The Archers’ Hollie Chapman interview: ‘I’m protective of Alice. I said, “she doesn’t die does she?”’

The Archers’ five-million listeners are no doubt still reeling after tonight’s episode that revealed a new and explosive plot-line leaving one of its core characters, Alice Carter (née Aldridge), facing arrest, court appearances and even prison.

For those who missed the radio drama (spoiler alert), Alice’s tragic descent from golden girl in her well-heeled family and globe-trotting aeronautical engineer to alcoholic mother took another dramatic downwards plunge. She is accused of being drunk-at-the-wheel when her car forced another off the road and into the river, all but killing its three occupants.

“When we first started talking about this storyline,” confesses Hollie Chapman, the actress who has played Alice for 25 years, joining the cast of the world’s longest running radio serial when she was just 11, “I remember saying to the producers, ‘she doesn’t die, does she?’ I feel very protective of her.”

And is her life at risk? The episode left that one open. Perched on a sofa at her family home amid the rolling fields of Essex, self-confessed “country girl” Chapman smiles enigmatically.

Another recent cliff-hanger on the world’s longest running radio soap – Alice’s cousin Helen Archer ended up in jail charged with attempted murder of her coercive-controlling husband, Rob Titchener – made national headlines. The show’s producers are clearly intent on repeating the feat by racking up the tension in the weeks ahead.

Unlike with film, theatre and TV actors – though 35-year-old Chapman has plenty of experience of all three (Holby City, Doctors, Don’t Blame The Koalas) – radio stars are known by their voice not their face. Yet you’d have to listen hard to recognise Chapman’s own down-to-earth twang as Alice’s more refined tones.

“I do get recognised occasionally, though” she says, “but not often, once while waitressing in my 20s in Maida Vale when I was doing lots of auditions, and then another time in a pub when someone said to me, ‘oh my goodness, you sound just like Alice from The Archers’. I laughed and didn’t say anything.”

How long has she known about what turmoil lies ahead for Alice? “No more than a few weeks. The producers have been very secretive about this one.” 

The cynical might wonder if this is all about diverting attention away from the grumbles among The Archers’ famously loyal fanbase at its round-up edition being shifted down the Radio 4 Sunday schedules to give a more prominent slot for Desert Island Discs. But that is to overlook its long track record of tackling social issues. Helen Archer’s gas-lighting, abuse and rape by her husband (which had a post-script when the villainous Rob returned last autumn) raised £80,000 for domestic abuse charities.

In now focusing its spotlight on alcoholism, the serial has, Chapman says, “educated me. I see addiction very differently now from how I did before. I am less judgmental. It’s an illness.”

And the build-up to the current all-enveloping crisis has been going on for three years now. Alice was revealed during the pandemic lockdown to be an alcoholic. “I liked how the introduction of her alcoholism has been handled,” says Chapman. “It wasn’t just ‘Alice is an alcoholic overnight’. In my mind at least she’d always been a bit of a party girl, a functioning alcoholic holding everything together.”

And making it public during lockdown chimed with something going on in the country, she believes. “It brought addiction to light for a lot of people. Alice wasn’t alone.” As the letters that Chapman received at the time made plain.

In the intervening years, she has been in rehab, separated from her (still) adoring husband, farrier Chris Carter, snogged the local policeman Harrison Burns (husband of her close friend Fallon) when drunk, and was condemned by the whole village as a bad mother to her infant daughter Martha. Just when she seemed to be getting things together – staying sober for two years – a romance with apparently eligible upper-class horsey-type Harry Chilcott, who initially hid his own alcoholism from her, sent her back to the bottle.

In her portrait of this young mother in crisis, Chapman brings something of herself. She, too, is a young mother – of three boys under the age of five, with her banker husband Ryan – and she knows about addiction.

“I have a family member very close to me and I have witnessed how they can manipulate situations to hide their drinking, and how families enable that without meaning to,” she says. “I’ve seen how it impacts not just on the addict but on their family and friends and jobs, their relationships with their children.”

She has also been eagerly taking on board all the research on the subject, working with producers and scriptwriters to draw on the frontline knowledge of charities like Action on Addiction to ensure that the on-air portrait of Alice is as real and realistic as possible. And, on occasion, taking the chance to talk to addicts who approach her after listening to the storyline on-air to better understand their mindset.

“Recently the research has been on what would cause Alice to relapse, and how an addict helping someone else with their recovery is one of the most common causes of an addict relapsing,” she says.

Some listener reactions to Alice’s scenes with Harry that have already been broadcast – notably a long three-in-the-morning telephone conversation at the beginning of last month when he finally confessed to her and she offered to accompany him to support groups – have prompted a busy thread of conversations on forums such as mumsnet. “Fair to say nobody was delighted to see the return of Harry… Alice is a blithering idiot to get involved with him again,” posted one contributor.  Another shared: “that episode with H and A on the phone was turgid.”

“Look,” says Chapman briskly, “you are always going to get people who say negative stuff. Everyone is different and you’re never going to make people think the same thing. If you don’t like it, turn it off.”

More broadly, she staunchly defends the radio soap for mixing storylines about social problems with the lighter stuff of Lynda Snell’s am-dram efforts, the flower and produce show, and – the original aim when The Archers first went on air in 1951 – reflecting the struggles farmers are facing in their fields. “Being real makes it hard, and I do know people who haven’t been able to listen because it is too close to home for them,” says Chapman. “But then on the flip side I’ve had recovering addicts who have got in contact with me to say this storyline is amazing.”

Raised “in wellies” in rural Leicestershire, the oldest of five, Chapman attended a local dance school. The teacher suggested to her parents – who knew nothing about theatre or acting – that she did the open audition for a new West End version of Annie and she landed the supporting role of Tessie.

Other parts followed after she became a boarder at Sylvia Young Theatre School in London (Tom Fletcher of McFly, Rita Orr and Bafta-winner Nicholas Hoult were contemporaries), and joined the cast of The Archers three years later.

“No one at Sylvia Young knew what The Archers was,” she says. “They were all in EastEnders. I hadn’t listened but Nanna did. She was my biggest fan.”

Playing Alice for so long (though dwarfed by fellow cast member Patricia Greene’s long reign as matriarch Jill Archer), she has become a sort of alter ego. “I feel I know Alice so well, that she’s mine. I have grown to understand how she works, especially the self-loathing,” she admits. “When she’s drunk, she says things that she doesn’t mean. But perhaps she really does mean them.”

That in vino veritas aspect fascinates her. “It is all about the underlying issues that Alice hadn’t dealt with,” says Chapman. “Her father’s illegitimate child, Ruairi, was brought into her family home and she was just told to accept and love him.  There is resentment there.”

And the occasional parallels between her life and her character’s life can be uncanny. “When Alice was in rehab trying to stop drinking because of the damage it would do to her unborn child, I was pregnant with my middle son,” she says. “It didn’t make me condemn her. If anything I was, oh gosh, she’s so unwell that she can’t even stop for her baby.” But Alice did stop? “Only until she gave birth and then she drank again straight away. So often addiction and mental health go hand in hand.”

It is sounding as if Chapman could write her own scripts. Does she have any input?: “Not really. It’s been so brilliantly written these past three years.” But if something makes her feel uneasy, she does speak up, including about the relapse, the car crash, and its aftermath. “I was a little bit nervous that her relapsing would make the listeners hate her,” she says. “She had got everyone back on her side, and then… But the producers promised me that the listeners would be on her side.”

As they seem to have been true to their word. In the forthcoming episodes, the whole of Ambridge is going to be up in arms blaming the car crash on Alice. Yet the story is being told in a way that listeners have the inside track on exactly what happened in those fatal few moments.

Nevertheless, it has been harrowing for Chapman to record the build-up. “When I recorded a scene aired last week, of Alice rummaging in the back of a cupboard for a bottle, when she relapsed, I wasn’t even speaking. All I did was drink a glass of water and it wasn’t even alcohol, but still I found myself emotional.”

Thankfully, there is, she reports, a real family-like support system among The Archers cast, when their character’s storyline is taking them to dark places. “In my case, particularly with Wilf [Scolding], who plays Chris. We’ve been through so much together, including a whole episode featuring just the two of us when we were breaking up.”

With three small children, there is little spare time between recording sessions in Birmingham to use her profile as other cast members have done to get involved in campaigning around the issues facing farming today. But she is, she confesses, full of admiration for those who do. “I loved Jeremy Clarkson on The Farm. He is so funny.”

What she is proud of, though, is how much the presence of younger members like her in the cast are changing the audience profile of The Archers and bucking broadcasting trends. It is, she points out, not only the top-performing, on-demand offering on the BBC Sounds app, but also one of the most sought after in the under-35 age group. “Some people have grown up with it, and find it comforting. And it is very relatable,” she says.

But there will be precious little comfort in the weeks to come for Alice. “She’s in for a hard time,” admits Chapman. “My advice would be, settle in, get ready because it is going to be good.”

Tune into new episodes of The Archers on Radio 4 on weekdays and Sundays at 7pm, as well as the omnibus on Sundays at 11am. It’s also available to catch up on BBC Sounds