I tried to make myself like it - because it's on Radio 4, because otherwise sane and sensible people of good judgement like it and because I thought it would provide a pleasant background to my evening drive home.

I found I couldn't stomach it for pretty much the same reasons that you outline. Anyone under the age of - let's say 55 - who claim they like it are doing so through sheer force of will - or out of deference to their parents's tastes or as a rite of invocation to an imagined England.

In short, it's much-a-larkins-about-nowt-manglin-snugbar-skittlesbollocks.

Won't catch on. I give it another fifty years at most.

something's been around for a long time doesn't mean it's any good.

Racism for example. Or Light Opera.

Adam & Joe did an edit of an episode of The Archers where they just kept the sighing. It was hilarious (and also sounded very filthy at times). It's probably still on their 6Music blog somewhere.

I have only been listening to the Archers for a couple of years. This is mainly because I spend a lot of time in the car and since it's now availabe on a podcast I can listen to it at my leisure while travelling. Why do I like it?
It's life in a place that I don't live in (the country).
It's full of types of people I don't generally come across living in London.
It runs at a pace which is not at all like my life.
There is a certain feel to The Archers which is very similar to the feel of a few tv programmes not saying that they are particulary good but I hope you get my drift - 'Last of the summer wine' (in it's early days). 'Dad's army'. Maybe because they don't seem to become out of date like many other sit com/tv shows do. Not the the best critic I'm afraid but maybe it's just because it's there and at times it's funny/moving/informative.

everything it knows about plotting , character development and humour. It's less violent and the female characters aren't contractually obliged to strip off in their first scene but apart from that....
I don't like soaps normally living in london eastenders is the most alien of them all but the archers I've always just enjoyed and have done since I was alot younger.

...because in the evening it is sandwiched between the comedy slot at 6.30 (often v.good) and the Arts programme Front Row (nearly always v.good). I'm usually cooking the tea, with the radio on, at that time...and...well...dammit, before you know it you need to know whether the cad Brian has got anyone else up the duff lately

if you have radio 4 on all day (and i do, as do lots of other people) then your ears prick up when you hear something interesting and you zone out the dross ... ('really? how much for a beach hut?')

in among all this however, at 1902hrs Sunday to Friday (repeated at 1402hr Mon-Fri), comes the archers and whether you like it or not is almost beside the point - given that it occupies a place somewhere between background noise and engaging radio, but has a continuing narrative, it tends to get soaked up along with all the other stuff, building on a structure that you have, somehow, internalised ... radio osmosis

then you're out in the pub and someone says, "that caroline really gets on my tits" and suddenly everyone's off - 20 mins of moaning about the archers ... you haven't even been conscious of *paying attention* but it instantly becomes clear that you remember the various storylines over the last few weeks better than you remember friends' birthdays ...

i like football - but i have to make an effort to go to games, keep up with rumours and gossip or watch it on tv ... with the archers i know a similar amount of detail having expended *zero effort* (aside from flicking the radio on when i get up) ...

surely there's a media studies/psychology PhD in this?

To the OP: The same question could be leveled at every activity known to man -- and certainly at most TV output. I'm not a follower, but - like Glenbervie - I have R4 on all day. You may as well dislike sunrise following sunset -- it just IS.

Sounds like I was trying too hard, and expecting too much.

Maybe though it's just too removed from my own urban background here in Scotland for me to identify with any of it: Our recent holiday in Cornwall brought home to me how very, very different southern English rural life is from what I'm used to.

My next "it can't really be as crap as I think, so what am I missing?" challenge would be cricket, but I'll digest the lessons of this one first.

...and if you're a Radio Times type person, then it's the acceptable face of soap. It's only one you'd say you liked out loud, even though you secretly like Corrie (hence this week's cover) and the others.

That said, I do dip in and have long periods when I'm listening and equally long ones when I'm not. For every polytunnel, farming quotas or sausage competition storyline there's a decent dark secret, love triangle or racism plot to balance it out.

It helps if you can identify the voices, and once that's done you're in.

I'm also from an urban Scottish background. Don't know whether that is a factor in my dislike of The Archers or not. All I can say is that the programme induces a feeling of mild nausea in me, much the same as I feel when accidentally hearing Steve Wright's Sunday Love Songs or Simon Bates (or just about anything, come to that) on Classic FM. Makes me want to read an Irvine Welsh novel as an antidote - and that's saying something!

which if I were pretentious I would call "je ne sais quoi". May be it's the fact that unlike TV soaps it hasn't succumbed to armed sieges, plane crashes or ridiculous gangster plots, so it still seems more grounded in "reality". Maybe it's because being on radio we all carry around our own individual picture of what Eddie Grundy, Ruth Archer or Alan the Vicar look like. May be it just has better developed characters (on the whole). Or maybe it is just the fact, as a previous poster alluded, that it can sink into your subconscious while you are doing something else and you suddenly find that you know a great deal about why the uneasy peace between Shula and Usha was shattered.

Mind you, I write as someone who used to schedule meetings at my company's main depot at 215 as it was a 15 minute drive from my office.

The Archers music would prompt my dad to rise from his chair and hit the off button. Even Just a Minute was allowed to burble on in the background sometimes, but never the Archers.

I'm with him now am as much Jim Naughtie as Rob da Bank. But the missus is a fan, I think it's a comfort thing. If the Archers is on on Sunday morning then all is basically OK. Actual content is irrelevent.

ps as we are on Radio 4 matters, is the fact that the disappearance of the Today programme is the signal for us to nuke whoever is in that sealed letter not a truly English phenomenon. I'm not sure the Americans would press the button if Katie Couric went off air.

They took Dick Barton: Special Agent off the Home Service in 1951 and replaced it with some twaddle about country folk. My dad, then aged eleven, was mortified and refused to listen to this Archers rubbish and bore a grudge towards what became Radio 4 to his dying day.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/8331558.stm