Gwen Berryman

Gwen Berryman0:01

BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts.

Speaker 10:05

Hello, I'm Lauren Laverne and this is the Desert Island Discs podcast. The surviving recording of this edition of Desert Island Discs did not include the music, so we've recreated the programme, adding the Castaways' choices. For rights reasons, the music is shorter than on the original broadcast. The presenter is Roy Plumley. I hope you enjoy listening.

Presenter0:35

The Archers are celebrating their 21st birthday on the year. It's a young programme by Desert Island Disc Standards.

Gwen Berryman0:41

Good gracious, how long has that been, Golly?

Presenter0:44

To join in the celebrations, I've invited Doris Archer to be our castaway this week in the person of Gwen Berryman. Gwen, many happy returns and welcome ashore. You seem to live a very gregarious life down at Ambridge. How well do you think you could stand up to loneliness?

Gwen Berryman1:00

Well, I could stand up to it if I had records that reminded me of people that I'd known here at home.

Presenter1:07

What would you be happiest to have got away from?

Gwen Berryman1:10

Oh, the noise of the present day world, and especially pop music in lifts. That annoys me beyond words.

Presenter1:19

Right. There's no pop music on on the Desert Island at all unless you've chosen some. Was it hard to narrow your choice down to eight records?

Gwen Berryman1:28

Well, I think I could have done it easily with twelve records, but I it hasn't been too difficult to choose eight of them. What's the first one? The Trumpet Voluntary. If I were thrown up onto a desert island, I'd be jolly glad to be alive, but I think I'd be a bit depressed all the same, and I'd love to have the trumpet voluntary to...

Gwen Berryman1:47

Fuck me up a bit.

Presenter2:49

What's your second disk?

Gwen Berryman2:50

I'd like to have the flower song from Carmen.

Speaker 42:57

Longer quartz marsha bombers at the floor.

Speaker 43:30

Oh so

Speaker 43:35

And if you're a single person, I'm not sure.

Presenter3:51

Of course, when you were a singer, went on

Gwen Berryman3:53

Yes, yes, I was trained as a singer, and I intended to be a singer, and an opera singer at that.

Presenter3:58

Did you ever sing with Hiddlenette?

Gwen Berryman4:00

Yes, I did. I sang in The Creation with him some years ago.

Presenter4:03

Yeah.

Gwen Berryman4:04

And um I did quite a bit of oratoria then, in those days.

Gwen Berryman4:08

And uh sang with quite well-known people, you know. I was the local one that was brought in to sing so that the expenses weren't too high.

Presenter4:16

Local. You were born in in Wolverhampton and you still live there.

Gwen Berryman4:17

And you still lived there? Yes. Was there a lot of theatre or music in your family? Well, my father was a musician. Was he? And my mother also played the piano.

Presenter4:26

Yeah.

Gwen Berryman4:26

When did you stop?

Presenter4:26

When did you start taking an interest?

Gwen Berryman4:29

Well, I think from almost the time I was born my father used to play such a lot, and also he was very interested in opera. I was actually called Margarita, you know, after Margarita in Faust.

Speaker 44:40

Uh

Gwen Berryman4:41

Because on the day I was born my father was playing in the orchestra for Faust.

Presenter4:45

Yeah.

Gwen Berryman4:45

And so I was called Gwendolen Margarita.

Presenter4:48

What was his instrument?

Gwen Berryman4:48

What was his

Gwen Berryman4:50

Cello. He played the cello.

Presenter4:51

Made the f

Presenter4:52

And when did you start the study?

Gwen Berryman4:54

I studied in Birmingham at the School of Music.

Gwen Berryman4:57

I studied really from the age of fourteen until I was seventeen. My voice was just nursed along, you know.

Presenter5:03

Yeah.

Gwen Berryman5:03

And then when I was 20, I came to the Royal Academy of Music.

Presenter5:07

Yes. Now before you came to London you had done your first broadcast.

Gwen Berryman5:11

Oh yes. I did my first broadcast in nineteen twenty six. The second act of The Marriage of Figaro I sang Susanna, and the last act of Faust, of course, which has followed me all through my life.

Presenter5:22

Yeah.

Gwen Berryman5:22

Yeah.

Presenter5:23

Yeah.

Presenter5:24

Was work easy to find when you had graduated?

Gwen Berryman5:26

Oh, no, certainly not.

Gwen Berryman5:28

When I'd been at the Academy for three years and I'd taken all the prizes and things that I could do, you know

Gwen Berryman5:35

I hoped that I would be able to sing, and when I went along to an agent, she said, Oh, come back when you're twenty eight. You'll be old enough then. You're too young to sing now. Well, I was twenty three, and I'd got to live until I was twenty eight. And so I went with the opera class from the Academy for an audition to be in Derby Day.

Gwen Berryman5:54

And of course I didn't think they'd want fat people to be in the chorus, and so they wouldn't want me.

Presenter5:59

This was the Light Opera by Alfred Reynolds and A. P. Holmes.

Gwen Berryman6:02

That's right, yes. But anyway, they did choose me to play the part, they hoped, of um misses Bones, and they thought a fat person playing misses Bones would be rather good, and also they wanted my voice in it, you see, which was quite good at that time.

Gwen Berryman6:17

Anyway, I got the job.

Gwen Berryman6:20

But then they told me that I had to be cockney and I couldn't do cockney. So in the end they asked me to be the understudy to Mabel Constanduros who played the part.

Speaker 16:28

Yeah.

Gwen Berryman6:28

And of course I got the job, and then I wrote home to my father and I said that I had a job on the stage, and he sent a telegram straight away, Do not take this job on the stage But of course I'd done it then and signed the contract, so that was all right.

Presenter6:43

And when did straight acting come into the pattern?

Gwen Berryman6:46

The repertory company came to Wolverhampton. I think it was the Terence Byron Repertory Company came, and they offered me two little bits, a sort of maid coming in, you know, and saying dinner is served sort of thing and then um another little play I can't remember but

Gwen Berryman7:02

The following year Derek Sahlberg's company came, and they had seven theatres at that time, repertory theatres.

Gwen Berryman7:11

and their producer from Birmingham, which was their main centre, saw me in an amateur production.

Gwen Berryman7:17

of and so to bed and he said she'd be good for little parts and so I was on, you see, I I was in their first production that they did.

Presenter7:26

And how long did you stay with the company?

Gwen Berryman7:27

Well, fourteen years.

Presenter7:28

Fourteen years, that was a good long spell.

Gwen Berryman7:30

It was. And of course I started with all small parts, you know, but uh gradually they gave me bigger parts and then finally they gave me the part of Mariah Heliwell in When We Are Married by JB Priestley.

Gwen Berryman7:42

And um I think that was the beginning, really, of my being an actress, shall we say.

Presenter7:48

And were you doing radio acting as well in Birmingham?

Gwen Berryman7:50

In Birmingham? No. I'd done the opera in 1926 and 1927, but then I didn't do anything else until 1947.

Presenter7:58

Mm-hmm.

Gwen Berryman7:59

And then I was in a play called The Old Wise Tale.

Presenter8:03

Arnold Bennett.

Gwen Berryman8:03

Arnold Bennett, yes. And it went out on Sunday nights, the Sunday night serial.

Gwen Berryman8:08

And, um

Gwen Berryman8:10

They asked me if I could do the the Stoke on Trent dialect, and I said no, I'm afraid not. But I sat on a bus in Stoke on Trent for two whole days and I think the conductors thought I was quite mad, but I did learn the dialect and I was able to do the part.

Presenter8:20

Don't

Presenter8:25

Good feel. Let's have your next record. What's that to be?

Gwen Berryman8:28

I know that Maradima liveth.

Presenter8:30

Trumma Sai.

Gwen Berryman8:30

From a sire, sung by Elizabeth Harwood. Her mother and I studied together at the Academy and we were great friends then, and I've known Elizabeth all her life.

Speaker 48:47

Yeah.

Speaker 48:59

And let it

Presenter9:39

Now the archer started in January 1951, twenty-one years ago.

Presenter9:43

Now how many instalments does that mean?

Gwen Berryman9:46

Well, something like five thousand five hundred.

Presenter9:50

Were you asked to audition for the part or?

Gwen Berryman9:52

Oh yes, yes, I had to go for an audition and they asked me to what uh I thought of the music, you know, Balwick Green.

Presenter9:58

Yeah.

Gwen Berryman9:59

And I said, oh, that sounds like a farmer walking down a country lane with his stick, knocking the heads off flowers, you know, for the joy of living.

Presenter10:07

Yeah.

Gwen Berryman10:07

And of course it was quite the right thing to say.

Presenter10:10

Now when you started, how long did you think the engagement was going to last?

Gwen Berryman10:13

Three months. Three months. Exactly three months, yeah.

Presenter10:13

Exactly.

Presenter10:16

The intention of the programme was a sort of Farming Dick Barton, written by the same authors as Dick Barton, Geoffrey Webb and Edward Mason.

Gwen Berryman10:22

Yeah.

Presenter10:24

Now how many other members of the cast have lasted the full twenty one years?

Gwen Berryman10:29

I think only two and Tony Shrine, of course, our producer, he's been with us from the beginning. But uh June Spencer is Peggy.

Gwen Berryman10:39

And Norman painting is Philip Archer.

Gwen Berryman10:43

And then of course Tom Forrest came in after about two months.

Gwen Berryman10:47

And Mrs. P, after about six weeks, something like that, she came in as a nurse.

Presenter10:50

Yeah.

Gwen Berryman10:53

You don't refer to it.

Presenter10:53

You don't record an episode every day, you you do learn a lot.

Gwen Berryman10:55

No, we do six a week. That takes Monday and Tuesday up.

Gwen Berryman10:59

And of course the five go out, and then there's one over each week, so that in five weeks we've got a week's holiday if we want to take it.

Presenter11:06

I see. And the Sunday Morning Omnibus Edition is a sort of rehash of the week's five installments.

Gwen Berryman11:11

Yes.

Presenter11:12

Now for many years the series went out on the overseas service as well.

Gwen Berryman11:16

Yes.

Presenter11:16

Now the Archers family has become a a national institution. You're all much in demand for opening fits and

Gwen Berryman11:22

Yeah.

Presenter11:23

Whatever.

Gwen Berryman11:24

Mm-hmm.

Presenter11:24

And that takes you pretty well all over the sh

Gwen Berryman11:26

Oh yes, we've had a lot of funny things happen to us as well, doing that sort of thing. But I'm afraid that's another story. It'll take too long.

Presenter11:34

You must know misses Archer's character very well. Is she musical?

Gwen Berryman11:37

Yes, yes. She sang quite a bit at the beginning, but of course now she's getting older she doesn't sing so much.

Presenter11:45

The Archers always originates in Birmingham, doesn't it?

Gwen Berryman11:47

Oh, yes, certainly.

Presenter11:49

And where is Ambridge?

Gwen Berryman11:51

Well, it's a little village near Bromsgrove. This was where the idea originated, you see, that there was a farm the same size as Brookfield. And it's in a village called Hanbury. And of course when we're on location doing things like the wedding of Grace and Philip, for instance, that took place at Hanbury Church.

Gwen Berryman12:12

And um of course about six hundred people turned up to the wedding, and only four hundred can get into the church, so I had to walk a mile and a half along the road to get there.

Presenter12:18

Shall I?

Presenter12:21

Good.

Gwen Berryman12:22

Because of colours being pal.

Presenter12:24

The artist also has a didactic purpose as well. It's an instructional programme.

Gwen Berryman12:26

As well as

Gwen Berryman12:28

Well, I think it was in the beginning. I think we were intended for the Class C farmer, or shall I say, a poor class farmer, you know, who didn't really know what to do at the right time of year. So quite a

Presenter12:40

Technical farming information.

Gwen Berryman12:41

Yes, and that's all correct. It's definitely good information.

Presenter13:32

You can you're now instructed yourself.

Gwen Berryman13:35

Yes, oh yes, I've learned quite a lot about it. But I do remember one time when Dan said um put so much of this fertilizer which they were discussing.

Gwen Berryman13:44

and he said put two tons to the acre.

Gwen Berryman13:47

And of course it should have been two hundred weight.

Presenter13:49

Makes a difference.

Gwen Berryman13:49

And uh so uh I think we had about five thousand letters. The next morning a whole van had to come up with the letters telling him that he'd made a mistake.

Presenter13:59

Sometimes you do what I believe are called topicality inserts. You can keep right up to date with the news, right up to the hour.

Gwen Berryman14:04

Right up.

Gwen Berryman14:05

Those are done in the the very day in question, you know.

Presenter14:08

Yes. Do you know what's going to happen in the story, or is every script a surprise?

Gwen Berryman14:12

It's a surprise really, and I think that's what's kept us fresh all the time we've been doing it, is that the the script is a surprise to us as well as to the audience.

Presenter14:20

Yeah.

Presenter14:21

The archers, of course, don't exist in limbo, as some serial characters do. They they grow older, they marry.

Gwen Berryman14:27

Mm, that's right. I hope I won't get too old.

Gwen Berryman14:31

But in the programme I'm about five years older than I really am, which makes me feel very old sometimes. Uh

Presenter14:37

But Uh

Gwen Berryman14:37

Uh

Presenter14:37

There have been some sensational developments in the story. There have been a couple of violent deaths.

Gwen Berryman14:42

Oh yes. Uh when Grace Archer died, that was Philip's first wife. That really was a shock to everyone, I think. And it was even a shock to me. I wasn't in the programme, and I heard it in Birmingham. They did that programme in London, so that no one should get to know about it, you see. Strict security.

Presenter14:54

So that no

Presenter14:57

Strict security.

Gwen Berryman14:58

And then um when she died and I heard Philip come in and say, Grace is dead, I I just wept myself, and although I knew something was going to happen, I just really wept. I felt awful.

Presenter15:08

Yeah.

Presenter15:10

And there's one character, was it your granddaughter, had an illegitimate child not very long ago.

Gwen Berryman15:14

Oh yes. But that's all finished now, you know. I believe that it was written up on one of the bridges in London, and it said Doris Archer is a prude because I told my daughter off. But anyway, now it's all settled, and she's very happily married, and has another child as well, but not married to the father of the first one.

Presenter15:33

Do you find many people believing that you are, indeed, Doris Archer?

Gwen Berryman15:38

Yes, I think the um the truth of the matter is that they're not sure and they really think I am a countrywoman and have all the characteristics and I think they very often make a mistake.

Presenter15:51

That

Gwen Berryman15:52

They feel that I would be a countrywoman. I suppose I'm very unsophisticated, let's say.

Presenter15:58

Do you ever feel yourself getting so involved that you start thinking that really this is your family, that you are?

Gwen Berryman16:04

Well, of course, I do live on my own and...

Gwen Berryman16:07

They have become my family. I really feel that they have become my family. And not just the characters of the programme, but the

Gwen Berryman16:15

The people, the technicians and the helpers in all ways from the BBC have really been marvellous to me.

Gwen Berryman16:22

All of them have been so kind.

Gwen Berryman16:24

And really they have become my family, there's no doubt about it.

Presenter16:28

You and Dan Archer are now immortalized on a B B C medallion.

Gwen Berryman16:31

Oh yes, yes, it's a very nice one too. It's about the same size as the gold medal I won. And um

Gwen Berryman16:39

It it really is very nice. There are Dan and I on the front of it, and it says BBC Radio 4, Arches Twenty One Years. And then the back is, I think, much nicer than the front.

Speaker 116:45

You're not

Gwen Berryman16:50

The back has the village of Ambridge on it, and I'd like to live there.

Presenter16:55

With all those country crafts at her fingertips, I'm quite sure Doris Archer could live off the land quite happily on a desert island. How but Gwen Berryman could she?

Gwen Berryman17:05

Well, of course, I should want to know what was growing on the island first. I think there'd be breadfruit plants, wouldn't there?

Presenter17:12

Bound to be.

Gwen Berryman17:12

Yes, and pineapples? Yes.

Gwen Berryman17:15

What about potatoes?

Presenter17:17

Done.

Gwen Berryman17:17

Oh sweet potatoes, yes, yes. Oh well I think I could manage very well and I'd be able to make my own clothes if there were nice big leaves and things there, I'm sure.

Presenter17:18

Yeah.

Presenter17:27

Yeah.

Presenter17:28

Right, record number seven.

Gwen Berryman17:31

Well, this one I'm choosing because I think it is most beautifully graceful singing and I think it is really a lovely thing, that letter duet.

Gwen Berryman17:43

From the third act of The Marriage of Figaro, Mozart.

Speaker 417:54

This hole is healer.

Speaker 418:06

See you

Speaker 418:13

Miss Lord's real soul.

Speaker 418:38

Somebody in your sword.

Presenter18:47

Now your last record.

Gwen Berryman18:48

Ah, now then, this is quite easy.

Gwen Berryman18:51

Because this will remind me of all the people I've met in the Archers. We made a record in about 1958 or 59, I think, and the first Dan Archer was in it, and he was singing with me. And it would remind me of the Archers right from the beginning until today.

Speaker 419:17

Soon we go.

Presenter19:41

The Archons

Presenter19:43

If you could only take one of your eight records, which would it be?

Gwen Berryman19:47

Well, I think it would have to be the trumpet voluntary because that would

Gwen Berryman19:51

dispel any despair that I had or felt. And I really think it it's so lively, isn't it? It's so uplifting altogether. I'd take that one.

Presenter20:02

And one luxury to take to the island with you?

Gwen Berryman20:05

Lots and lots of uh writing materials. Could you get them all into one thing so that I can uh

Gwen Berryman20:12

I can write somebody's memoirs and my own as well.

Presenter20:15

All right. And one book apart from the Bible and Shakespeare, which are already there.

Gwen Berryman20:20

Well now this is very difficult because the Bible and Shakespeare would take up the whole of the time I had to read, I'm sure.

Gwen Berryman20:28

So I've decided that I would like a cookery book with most delicious pictures of food. And then when I was eating the plant of that breadfruit tree,

Gwen Berryman20:39

I'd have lovely thoughts of those luscious dishes. I'm very greedy, you know.

Gwen Berryman20:45

Can I have that?

Presenter20:45

I do. Can I have that? Of course you can.

Gwen Berryman20:47

Yeah.

Presenter20:47

And thank you, Wen Berryman, for letting us hear your Desert Island Disc.

Gwen Berryman20:52

Oh, well, thank you very much indeed. Bye-bye.

Presenter20:54

Goodbye, everyone.