Custard, culverts and cake - Cara Courage

Leading scholars combine their love of The Archers with their specialist subjects, in Custard, Culverts and Cake - a sometimes serious, but most often wry look at the people of Ambridge. A group of Archers Academics take on subjects such as food, geography, social media, faith. There is, naturally, an entire section dedicated to the Helen and Rob storyline.

Cara Courage is a placemaking academic and arts consultant, writer/commentator, curator and project manager. She is author of Arts in Place: The Arts, the Urban and Social Practice, and works as an Adjunct at University of Virginia, researching and developing creative placemaking metrics and as a strategist at Futurecity, whilst running her own placemaking projects. She has been listening to The Archers for around 15 years and grew up with the programme on her grandmother's farm on Exmoor. She talks about the pleasure and pain of her Archers fandom in a talk My BDSM relationship with The Archers.

US and UK contributors, members of the Academic Archers Network, explore aspects of the long-running BBC soap opera The Archers, employing perspectives from urban policy, rural education, cultural studies, social work, community resilience, rural ministry, and social and behavioral aspects of cyber security. B&w genograms and kinship diagrams of characters are included. The book stems from papers delivered at a conference called "The Archers in Fact and Fiction: Academic Analysis of Life in Rural Borsetshire."
(protoview.com) - Annotation 2017

"Custard Culverts and Cake involves the application of genuine research methodologies and concerns to the world of Ambridge and Borsetshire… This is a valuable book, with serious points to make about social sampling and effective research conceptualization; a 'should read' for research methodology."