List of The Archers characters
This is a list of many of the characters from the long-running British radio soap The Archers.
The Archer family tree
The Archer family
Jill Archer Patterson is the widow of Phil Archer and matriarch of the family. She was his second wife, and with him had four children: twins Shula and Kenton, and David and Elizabeth. She is busily involved in village life and supports her children by taking on child-minding duties. Jill is an active member of the Women's Institute, opened up a holiday cottage business, and is teaching her grandson, Josh, how to keep bees. Jill has a less traditional outlook on life than her late husband, who had been a Justice of the Peace, reflected in her opposition to both foxhunting and private education. Following a burglary at Glebe Cottage she was asked by David and Ruth to return to Brookfield which subsequently became permanent. In 2019, she surprised her family by announcing that she had met a new man – Leonard Berry, a widower whom she met while visiting the Laurels. Since then, Jill and Leonard have enjoyed a cosy companionship, complicated slightly when Leonard thought Jill wanted them to get married – when she made it clear that she had no desire to have another husband, they happily resumed their relationship.Christine Barford 'Archer, formerly Johnson , is the younger sister of Phil. A skilled horsewoman, she ran the local riding stables for many years. In the early 1950s she was a close friend of Grace Fairbrother who later married her brother Phil. Christine married Paul Johnson; it was discovered she was infertile, and they adopted a son, Peter. In the mid-1970s Paul deserted the family and he was later killed in a motorway crash in Germany. In 1979 Christine married George Barford, a gamekeeper, which was seen as a class transgression, even though her uncle, Tom Forrest was also a gamekeeper, and colleague of her future husband. Her marriage to George lasted over 25 years and was happy, but latterly they experienced difficult times as their house burned down due to an arson attack by Clive Horrobin. George died peacefully whilst they were waiting for the house to be re-built. Christine lived with Peggy Woolley for some years but in 2018 suffered a fall and went into The Laurels initially for respite but is intending to take up a place in an assisted living flat. She lost her capital in a fraud perpetuated by associates of Matt Crawford. Since 2019, Christine has become a silent character.
Lilian Bellamy, Archer is the twice-widowed, gin-soaked, chain-smoking second daughter of Peggy Archer. After acquiring her second husband Ralph Bellamy in 1971, she left Ambridge to live with him in tax exile in the Channel Islands; she has by him a grown-up son James, who lives in London with Robert Snell's daughter Leonie and their son Mungo. Bellamy senior died in 1980, but Lilian unaccountably returned to Ambridge in 2003 and took up with Matt Crawford ; her exploits caused much gnashing of teeth from her respectable sister Jennifer Aldridge. Lilian was elected to the parish council in January 2006. Lilian took dancing lessons from Mike Tucker after she discovered that Crawford's ex-wife was a much better dancer than she. In 2008 she and Crawford were briefly separated, and Lilian was an unwelcome guest at The Bull, but with the connivance of Sid and Jolene they were reunited. Crawford has since served a prison term for fraud. Their relationship was further tested when his long-lost brother Paul Morgan sought out, befriended, and ultimately fell in love with Lilian. After Matt's release the couple grew closer and ran property investment start-up Amside Holdings together – until Matt deserted her to live with another woman in Costa Rica. Since then she has formed a relationship with Justin Elliott, a wealthy businessman.
Tony Archer is the step-son of Jack Woolley being the youngest child and only son of Jack and Peggy Archer. In his younger days he romanced a string of girlfriends. In 1972 Jane Petrie, an attractive young art teacher from the fictional Borchester, was running the summer school at Arkwright Hall. The distraction would get Tony the sack from Ralph Bellamy's dairy enterprise. In 1974 he settled down to marry Pat, with whom he now runs a fully organic establishment at Bridge Farm. Despite owning an MG sports car, bought with a windfall from his mother, he is generally considered to be a rather dull man. His brother-in-law Brian Aldridge enjoys winding him up over farming matters, and dinner parties involving the two couples usually ended in tears. Pat and Tony had three children, John, Helen and Tom. John was killed in a tractor accident. Helen had a baby boy, Henry Ian Archer, through AI, a decision of which Tony initially disapproved. Tom runs a sausage business and makes pork ready meals under the Tom Archer brand. Tony suffered a heart attack in late February 2012, and a serious farmyard accident in autumn 2014. Having recovered from both, he now takes more of a back seat in the family business.
Pat Archer Lewis Tony's wife since 1974 is of Welsh descent. Much taken with studying feminism in the mid-1980s, she came close to having an affair with her lecturer, Roger, just before Bridge Farm entered the process of becoming organic. Affected by severe depression at the time of John's death, she discovered at the end of 2011 that he had fathered a child. Filled with remorse, Pat had strongly disapproved of Sharon, John's girlfriend, and this discovery turned into an obsession which caused problems for her family. She also had problems with her daughter Helen's new boyfriend Rob in 2014, especially given the affair and the breakdown of a marriage within which they were brought together. Although she came to accept him after Helen made a drastic move and left her family home and moved in with Rob in February, she had questioned whether Rob had played a part in Helen quitting her long-running job at the Ambridge Organics store. Her deceased son John's teenage son Johnny took up residence at Bridge Farm when he came to the village but when Helen and her children returned both Tom and Johnny moved to Number 1, The Green owned by Will Grundy.
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Shula Hebden Lloyd, Archer, previously Hebden is the elder daughter of Phil and Jill and twin sister of Kenton. Her first husband, Mark Hebden, a solicitor, was killed in a road accident in 1994 that also involved her best friend Caroline Bone. Shula and Mark's son Daniel was born after the death of his father as a result of IVF treatment after a long struggle with infertility. Some years after Mark's death, Shula had an affair with the village doctor, thus two-timing her boyfriend Alistair whom she subsequently married. This was in the context of Shula's devout Christianity and membership of the local Parish Council. She owns and runs the riding stables which formerly belonged to Christine Barford, her aunt. She used once to have great fun with her best friend, Caroline, but later Caroline became engrossed in her relationship with her husband Oliver Sterling and their business activities. After her marriage to Alistair, Shula lost her lightheartedness and became rather dour, self-centred and even, at times, sanctimonious, as evidenced by her attitude to the marriage to Usha Gupta, a Hindu, of the vicar, to whom Shula had been 'right-hand woman' for the parish. Coping with the childhood arthritis of her son, Daniel, did not help, nor did her husband's gambling addiction, which nearly destroyed their marriage before he finally admitted to owing huge sums to Matt Crawford and others. The couple resolved to stay together; they remortgaged the business to pay off the debts and Alistair attended Gamblers Anonymous meetings. Daniel was expected to go to university to read law in his father's footsteps, but upset his mother by joining the Royal Tank Regiment, though later she accepted his choice of career. In 2018, Shula stunned Alistair when she told him their marriage was over. Now divorced, they are still good friends and probably closer than they had been in the last few years of their marriage. In 2019, Shula surprised her family when she announced her intention to take the initial steps to becoming a Church of England vicar. She moved to Sunderland in 2022 for work, when the actor retired.
Alistair Lloyd , Shula's ex-husband, is a vet. His father Professor Jim Lloyd stayed with them at Christmas and New Year 2007–8 while his broken leg healed. A committed atheist he riled Shula and antagonised his son, but indulged Daniel and contrived to get along with everyone else, except for Phil who saw through him. Alistair mentored Ryan at Gamblers Anonymous. Jim later relocated, bought his own property in Ambridge and went into a business partnership with Kenton which was dissolved when Kenton moved to the Bull. Currently Alistair is living in Jim's house, where Jazzer McCreary was also co-resident until he moved in with Tracy. In 2019 Alistair's sister Fiona Lloyd visited Ambridge to celebrate her father Jim's birthday.
Kenton Archer is portrayed as the wastrel of the Archer family. Having turned his back on the family farm to join the Merchant Navy, Kenton tried his hand at a number of ventures, including selling antiques and running a wine bar. He disappeared to Australia and New Zealand for several years and was married, had a daughter, and divorced before returning home. Kenton's former partner, Kathy Perks, is the ex-wife of Sid Perks, the late landlord of The Bull. His current wife is Sid's widow, Jolene, whom he married in autumn 2013 at Lower Loxley. Together they run The Bull.
Jolene Archer, formerly Perks, previously Tuson, originally Rogers, widow of Sid Perks, whose third wife she was, and landlady of the Bull. When younger she was a stalwart of the Borsetshire Country and Western scene, and object of Eddie Grundy's affections, much to Clarrie's distress. Following Sid's untimely death she formed a relationship with Kenton Archer, and they were married in 2013.
David Archer is the second son of Phil and Jill and, as the only child of the four to show any interest in, or aptitude for, farming, has assumed responsibility for Brookfield Farm. As he has aged he has become increasingly caring, for example driving up to Northumberland to bring his widowed mother-in-law to stay, and renting a piece of land to Joe Grundy to allow him to keep the barn he had erected without planning permission. Brookfield has suffered from bovine TB, but David is enthusiastic about his herd of Herefords. His cowman's heavy-handed advice that they should dispense with the services of Shula's husband as vet for their dairy herd in favour of a specialist caused a serious family rift, and was followed by his near-affair with Sophie Barlow. Recently, he bought an old tractor, dubbed "Rufus", which he has restored.
Ruth Archer, Pritchard is the wife of David Archer. Unusually the character comes from a real rather than fictional place, Prudhoe in Northumberland. She came to Ambridge as a Harper Adams student looking for agricultural work experience in 1987, and promptly met David, who was keen to settle down: the couple married within two years. They have three children: Philippa, Josh and Ben. Ruth survived breast cancer which struck in 2000, undergoing a mastectomy operation. Ruth's utterance "Oh noooooo", spoken in her Northumberland accent, was frequently parodied on the BBC Radio 4 comedy programme Dead Ringers. In an unpopular and heavily criticised plotline Ruth teetered on the brink of an affair with farm employee Sam Batton in the autumn of 2006. Many listeners considered Ruth's behaviour during this storyline to be entirely out of character, and therefore unbelievable. Others thought her immature self-centred vacillation was entirely in character, and that it was the largely off-air rehabilitation of the marriage and the family's 'blind eye' that was unbelievable. She has since undergone breast reconstruction surgery, and coped rather better than David with the sudden transformation of priggish daughter Pip into a very stroppy seventeen-year-old with a much older boyfriend, Jude, who eventually dropped her. More recently, Ruth has suffered a miscarriage and championed a potential move from Brookfield to Prudhoe should "Route B" be constructed, breaking the farm in two. Although David went along with this at first, he had doubts and confessed he could never leave Ambridge.
Elizabeth Pargetter, Archer . The youngest child of Phil and Jill Archer, Elizabeth is the widowed lady of Lower Loxley. Following her marriage to Nigel Pargetter, she took to her role enthusiastically and her quick mind and sound business sense ensured that the Hall ran like a well-oiled machine. Her practical side was the perfect grounding for her eccentric and slightly scatty husband, who died in a fall from the roof on 2 January 2011. As the family rallied round, devastated Elizabeth drew her precious twins close to her. After David admitted to her that it had been he who had persuaded her husband to go onto the roof in the first place, Elizabeth exploded in a violent rage and swore she would never forgive him. After 18 months Elizabeth realised the feud had gone on for too long, and family relations returned to normal.
Helen Titchener, Archer , Tony and Pat Archer's daughter, makes a cheese called Borsetshire Blue in the farm dairy and runs the organic farm shop, Ambridge Organics, in Borchester. After the suicide of her gamekeeper partner Greg Turner in 2004, she suffered from anorexia nervosa, but recovered after a time at a specialist clinic. In 2006 she dated a journalist who quickly rejected her; this subsequently threatened a return to her earlier problems. On New Year's Day 2007, while driving drunk, she knocked down Mike Tucker but Tom, a passenger in the car, took the blame. The shock of this event made her re-evaluate her life and she has since helped develop a new type of cheese with Oliver Sterling, named Sterling Gold. After another failed relationship she decided that she wanted a child more than she wanted a partner and became pregnant by artificial insemination – a decision which caused friction within the family, particularly alienating Tony. Father and daughter were reconciled, however, after the birth of her son Henry Ian Archer, who was delivered by emergency caesarean section the day after New Year's Day 2011, Helen having been diagnosed by the vicar's midwife daughter with pre-eclampsia. In 2013 she was attracted to the recently arrived dairy-unit manager, Rob Titchener. Intimacy ensued, although Rob was still married to Jess, who remained in Hampshire caring for her sick father. Helen and Henry moved in with Rob in early 2014, and Helen and Rob married in summer 2015. During 2015, the increasing indications that Rob was coercively controlling and emotionally abusing Helen became a major plot line. In April 2016, after meeting Jess in secret, Helen stabbed Rob after he refused to let her and Henry leave. Subsequently, she was arrested and charged with attempted murder. In an hour-long special broadcast on Sunday 11 September 2016, she was ultimately acquitted after the jury decided that she had acted in self-defence.
Tom Archer is the younger son of Tony and Pat. He took over his elder brother's pig herd after John was killed in a tractor accident, going on to produce organic sausages. Tom and his then girlfriend, Kirsty Miller, faced criminal charges in 1999 for the destruction of a field of genetically modified crops on Brian Aldridge's land, but neither was convicted. Tom is highly ambitious for his sausage-making business, but his contract with a supermarket chain nearly bankrupted him, despite his disastrous affair with their buyer, Tamsin. Tom was engaged to Brenda Tucker between May 2009 and April 2013.
Tom decided to throw in his lot with Brian Aldridge, husband of his aunt Jennifer, becoming a junior partner in the business. In the process, the sausage business lost its organic status, which created further tension between the families. In February 2006 he started dating Brenda Tucker, having provided support to her when her mother died suddenly two months earlier. Later the same year, Tom expanded his business and set up a new independent business, Gourmet Grills'', essentially a burger van albeit specialising in high-quality meat products. When Helen ran over Mike Tucker, Tom took the blame and, unaware that it had been Helen driving, Mike turned against him, opposing his relationship with Brenda. Mike subsequently discovered the truth, Helen paid for the driving course that Tom was sentenced to attend, and Tom and Brenda moved into one of the holiday cottages at Home Farm. After Will Grundy bought No. 1 The Green, Tom and Brenda rented the house from Will. After a brief split from Brenda, they got back together and became engaged on 29 May 2009. In April 2013 Brenda decided to end the engagement and the couple separated. Tom later got back together with Kirsty, with whom he got engaged at Christmas 2013, the ring being in the last Christmas cracker, but after a crisis of confidence, Tom broke up with Kirsty in the vestry moments before their planned wedding. Subsequently, Tom sold his business and moved to Canada. He returned to Ambridge as soon as he heard about his father's accident.
After his sister Helen's trial and acquittal, Tom and Kirsty got back together for one evening and she later discovered that she was pregnant. While preparing for the birth of the child Tom gained a Nuffield Scholarship, which he hoped would enable him to set up an organic baby -food business. Kirsty miscarried and Tom lost all enthusiasm for baby food, returning from his travels instead with a passion for fermented food, something not widely shared in the family nor the village. While on the Nuffield Scheme, Tom fell for a previous Nuffield Scholar and then mentor, Natasha. After a long period of pining, Tom discovered that she was similarly attracted and they married after a whirlwind romance. They lived for a while in the flat above the village shop before moving back in with Tony and Pat. After learning that Natasha was expecting twins, they moved into April Cottage. Twin daughters Nova and Seren were born in July 2022.
Pip Archer was christened Philippa in homage to David's father and Rose after Ruth's aunt: the eldest Brookfield child is known in the family as Pip, and at college as Phiz. She inherited some of grandfather Phil's interest in music, learning to play the piano and singing solos at carol concerts. Pip has a clear interest in farming and also caring for the environment. Pip split from her first boyfriend, Jonathan, a boy she met at her YFC, and began an affair with a much older man, a mature student at Borchester College called Jude Simpson. Her parents did not approve. Jude eventually left the country without her after leading Pip to believe that they were going on a round-the-world backpacking trip together. After a work placement in Yorkshire, she became more focused on her future and the future of the farm. She finished her degree in the summer of 2015 and accepted a post with an international agri-business with which she could gain experience of farming around the world. But during the initial orientation, she changed her mind and decided to return home to Ambridge and work with her parents at Brookfield. She became involved with Toby Fairbrother, a son of Robin Fairbrother. As a result, Pip became pregnant, leading to the birth of Rosie Ruth Grace Archer, her third forename recognising the Fairbrother heritage. Pip's relationship with Toby fell apart, and since September 2023 Pip has found romance with Stella Pryor, who managed Home Farm.
Josh Archer, played by Angus Imrie, made his first appearance during the episode broadcast on 13 September 1997. He was originally played by Cian Cheesbrough. Josh is Ruth and David Archer's elder son, and Pip and Ben's brother. Growing up, Josh helped his parents out around the farm. He also took part in a spate of graffiti around the village, for which he was grounded. Josh later partnered with Neil Carter in a free-range egg business, before launching his own business buying, renovating, and selling farm vehicles.
Ben Archer, played by Ben Norris. Ben is David and Ruth Archer's younger son and Pip and Josh's brother, having been born on 15 March 2002, delivered by his father on the kitchen floor. He has had a remarkably quiet childhood as Brookfield has been less important in the village with Bridge Farm elbowing other farms out of the spotlight. He has spent much time playing computer games with Rúairi Donovan and since gaining a voice they have taken a huge interest in off-road driving and Ben helped Jill in the kitchen at Christmas. Ben debuted on 28 October 2018. As a reward for his misdemeanours and to get him interested in farming Ben is now training the new sheepdog, Bess. He is training to be a nurse but after a mental health crisis took a break from his studies.