"Amos is a character."
That was my entree.
Those four words were spoken by my mother one autumn afternoon in 1976, four years after Emmerdale Farm (as it still was then) had started. It was a time when - for reasons too painful to resurrect in the present narrative - I was in between bouts of full-time education, languishing at home most days. The statement may have been by way of a preemptive strike on my mothers' part - an excuse or rationale for her watching the programme in order to forestall some mocking comment from me - although it's equally likely that her assessment of the publican was intended as an oblique invitation to escape into that rural make-believe world with her, much as she had slyly enticed me with chicken soup when, some eight years earlier, I first began to take an active interest in Crossroads.
I can't recall now how often I shared those afternoon visits to Beckindale (as the village was then known). The repeats which started on ITV3 recently are no help, as they began not with Episode One but with the first example of the programme's rejigged name, coinciding with the arrival in the village of the Tates, and all the attendant intrigue and duplicity.
But Emmerdale, or Emmerdale Farm, became a bond between mother and child which extended well into Kim Tate's reign. And when illness eventually necessitated a relinquishing of the soaps which had sustained or diverted my mother over the years it was Emmerdale which was the very last to go. I recall once, rather ambitiously, trying to provide a voiceover in the manner of Mrs Cherry (the gossip whose knitting hands used to be seen before each episode of Crossroads) on a VHS tape of several missed episodes I had taped for her. I took the video to my place of work, somehow managing to justify the time and effort as part of something or other, and ... well, I can't remember just how far I got with it but it was never completed or sent, and I really ought to have posted off the unadorned tape.
But I didn't.
At some point, whether I was still at home or had moved down South, Emmerdale (as I'll now refer to it) did become appointment viewing for me. This was certainly the case by 1989 and that adoption of a sleeker title: it became an escape from the pressures of my job and a continuing link with my mother.
Amos, that well-known "character" who had first lured me into the village, was still prominent then, as was confirmed when watching early repeats on ITV3. Although Les Dawson famously derided the programme as "Dallas with dung" the balance didn't immediately shift in favour of the former when Kim Tate first appeared: the Sugdens remained prominent for quite a while, although I did have the sense, in one repeat in which Annie bade goodbye to Matt Skilbeck with a restrained but undoubtedly emotional and heartfelt "God bless you", that I was witnessing a remnant of an earlier era of the programme. The soap's creator, Kevin Laffan, was not pleased about the shift in tone, or so I've read, but I don't know what stage of its evolution proved the tipping point for him.
The plane crash was certainly a stunt too far for some viewers and critics. Not me, though: I recall how carefully and sensitively it was done. Someone involved with the programme talked later about the need to get rid of "dead wood", and I believe at least one actor was driven into a long depression after years of secure employment and soap stardom. I enjoyed that actor's performance and missed him, but it's an odd thing: viewers are remarkably resilient - or maybe just heartless. Rewatching the days of Amos and Henry's affectionate bickering it felt to me as though that was the best incarnation of Emmerdale, but now that the ITV3 repeats have whizzed through several years (ten episodes are repeated each week) I've adjusted to each new set of characters, learnt to relish what they have to offer, and Amos (whisper it) is but a distant dream. Besides, the wily gamekeeper-turned-poacher Seth remains, a seemingly permanent fixture, the spirit of the village, though I know his death will eventually come on ITV3 as it did on the terrestrial channel.
I suppose this is partly because newer actors are fulfilling, at least in part, the functions of the departed: Edna Birch may be possessed of more punitive zeal than Amos but she shares his predilection with the past, and on many occasions during recent repeats she and Betty can be heard providing, sotto voce, a choric commentary on the follies of others.
Advances in technology also mean that there is more opportunity for today's viewer to savour details of individual performances. I usually record the repeats and, when watching, frequently have cause to rewind a few seconds in order to relish the way Dominic Brunt (Paddy) or others have spoken a line or, indeed, played a whole scene. Watching soap episodes out of sequence and catching up with an episode when you're already familiar with the outcome is generally a far less satisfying experience than adhering to strict chronology: soaps tend to be heavily narrative-driven, and once the surprise is gone there isn't always much left. But revisiting the early 2000s of Emmerdale, as I'm currently doing, retaining a broad sense of how the various plotlines turn out, I'm freer simply to enjoy the actors and the choices they make from moment to moment. Brunt is forever fascinating for the fresh spin he will put on some seemingly workaday line or add some small bit of business, and Marlon's (Mark Charnock's) perennial amusement at his own laboured sarcasm and the variety of ways in which Eric Pollard (Christopher Chittell) meets with humiliation never stale. Nor can the gunslinging hands of Bob Hope (Tony Audenshaw) go unmentioned. And Alan Turner (Richard Thorp), no longer the proprietor of the Woolpack, is currently doing sterling work as amused observer of the idiocies of others.
A former colleague who is a respected Shakespearean actor was briefly in Emmerdale Farm in its earliest days and occasionally at work we discussed the soap. He didn't admire every actor's performance but still watched the show from time to time and said that certain scenes were as good as anything in theatre.
Which is precisely how I feel. And the quality of the writers on the show, most notably Karin Young - still writing for the current incarnation of Emmerdale - means that the actors often have good material to tackle. She, more than anyone - though there have been many good writers along the way, such as John Chambers - seems to have the knack of humanising the Dingles, the ne'er-do-well family who still figure prominently in today's village. In the days when the writers' credit appeared at the end of the show I used to try to guess which episode might have been her handiwork, and enough time has passed since the original transmissions to make this a challenge once again. I'm not always right, but often enough to make me wish that there might exist a bookmaker so crazed as to offer odds on it ...
Long experience tells me that there is no point in trying to extol the virtues of soaps to non-believers - or even the worth of a particular soap to someone inexplicably in thrall to another example of the genre - but there is something special about Emmerdale.
I've written earlier about watching Crossroads with my mother. By the time of my regular Emmerdale viewing we'd be watching separately, though we would have chatted about the show over the phone or on my visits home. I have occasionally wondered why Emmerdale was the last to go, and why it continued to command her attention when Coronation Street palled. The argument which could be made about Emmerdale's blend of comedy and drama could also be made about the more established programme. In one scene after the death of Marlon's wife Tricia she revisits him as a ghost, something which it might have been correct to say had never happened in Coronation Street ... only then it did, with Jack and Vera. I can only say that such a scene feels more fitting, more natural, in Emmerdale.
Perhaps it's partly down to the enclosed nature of the rural soap: it's a village, and although a town and city aren't far away it's cosier, more dreamlike, for viewers stuck in towns and cities than Weatherfield. The pace is, perhaps, gentler. Finally, however, I think it comes down to the acting and the writing: those variegated individuals who have given so much over the years to create this appealing and comforting dreamworld. I thank them all.
At a certain point during the decades-old repeats I suddenly become aware that I was now, in effect, watching on my own rather than revisiting the experience of being connected to my mother. There are plotlines, whole rafts of characters, unknown to her ... and as Emmerdale is about to celebrate its fiftieth birthday with no sign of grinding to a halt it may well be that it will outlive me too.
A melancholy thought, but perhaps soaps will be to some future poet what trees were to Thomas Hardy, reminders of time passing:
Yet, Dear, though one may sigh,
Raking up leaves,
New leaves will dance on high -
Earth never grieves! -
Will not, when missed am I
Raking up leaves.
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