Not exactly​ an addiction but a compulsion. When I started to write full-time about the theatre, I was fixated on television soaps. Not all of them. I didn’t have an afternoon habit. Just EastEnders, which I had watched from the beginning (and failed to persuade the then editor would be a subject for this paper), Coronation Street and Brookside. I would come home from King Lear or the Oresteia to a pile of video cassettes: hours of hearing Patsy Palmer yelling for ‘Rickeeee!’ I always watched the recordings immediately, unable to save an episode for the following day.

The talent on telly was often stronger than the new work on stage. EastEnders had the best plots and best names – hard to beat Dirty Den. Brookside had scowling authenticity and the acting of Sue Johnston. Corrie had pretty much everything. The parade of glowering, glittering females. The insouciant snap. Deirdre’s mother, Blanche (who walked out with a funeral director played by the comedian Roy Hudd), was a marvellous gloombag. Standing beside a cardiganed Ken Barlow as her daughter left the street in a taxi, she moaned: ‘I hate this.’ ‘Saying goodbye?’ Ken asked sympathetically. ‘No,’ Blanche said. ‘Waving.’

It is more difficult to explain the lure of the one soap to which I am still loyal. I listen to The Archers every night, as automatically as I brush my teeth. Sometimes with a stirring of the blood when the emphasis shifts from the literally entitled farming family to less soil-bound, particularly well-acted characters: George Grundy! Jakob Hakansson! Tracy Horrobin! Sometimes with a quickening of curiosity: is Helen going to stab her coercive controller? Yet the episodes are quite often dull and frequently irritating. The cast has at least one dud actor.

Characters are more like neighbours than friends: familiar but strange. An experiment during lockdown of giving the programme over to monologues was a catastrophe: it was impossible to believe in these inner lives. The radio allows a particular intimacy: the entwining of characters’ lives with listeners’ daily habits. My unswerving but not uncritical attachment is, I used to think, like the attachment to an old pet, whose hair is often matted and teeth yellowish but whose eyes can still light up puppyishly, whose tail is prepared to wag and who never runs away. I now realise that, as the faithful follower, it is I who am the dog.

The programme was given a special ‘at 75’ prize at this year’s BBC Audio Drama Awards, where it is always disconcerting to see the word made flesh. Was this the equivalent of the Alan Bennett Soft Boiled Egg Award (eat one when you are ninety and you are called wonderful)? Not entirely. Longevity has fuelled some of the best plotlines, entangling the memories of listeners. When Jack Woolley, a businessman from Birmingham who wooed a village matriarch, developed dementia, his past life as an entrepreneur swam behind every new fumble. The condition unwound so gradually, flickering on and off for months, that the listeners’ uncertainty matched his own: it was as if the sound was being turned down. Hard for a series to get it right by holding on so patiently. When Coronation Street’s Mike Baldwin lost his mind, he dropped it abruptly on the cobbles with an unconvincing clatter.

BBC Radio doesn’t much advertise its writers. Trails of documentaries often foreground a presenter rather than an author, and writers for The Archers, a rotating band, do not get a big billing. Some of the time they aren’t worth it, and it is part of the supposed naturalness of soaps that they are held somehow to write themselves. Still, several startling passages of dialogue have sent me scrolling through the week’s listings to unveil an author. Katie Hims can nail a character through their choice of confectionery: of course, the trad Jim Lloyd would go for wine gums. Nick Warburton scripted a bonkers visit by a character obsessed with train timetables and pebbles, then cleverly had one of the most stolid residents complain that the incomer was a bore.

Irony hovers over the slurry. Radio producers have always liked to wink at their medium, putting on programmes about jugglers or ventriloquists. Years ago, as a radio critic, I was invited to Broadcasting House to listen to a play which delivered its thriller plot through sound effects alone. Surely not the only example of wordless drama on the wireless but perhaps the only one written by an actor most famous for comic misunderstanding of language: the author was Andrew Sachs, of Fawlty Towers. In The Archers, a crew of silent characters circle the action. Years ago Jennifer (now dead) called out to her daughter Alice (now a recovering alcoholic) to come in from the swimming pool. Alice had not yet spoken on air and the command was met with silence. ‘So irritating when she does not answer,’ Jennifer complained. For a long time a chauffeur called Higgs was often summoned and discussed but never himself talked. The sexually provocative sisters Tilly and Molly Button now spread excitement without a word. There is a notion that Higgs may be named after the narrator of Samuel Butler’s Erewhon; in which case – nothing more arch than The Archers – are the Button girls a nod to Gertrude Stein’s nickname for nipples? It may become clear when, as will surely happen, one day someone concocts an episode with an entire cast of non-speakers. I’ll be listening.