Ysanne Churchman, actress who played Grace Archer, killed off in a stable fire in The Archers – obituary
Ysanne Churchman, who has died aged 99, made history on September 22 1955 when she appeared for the last time as Grace Archer, the character sacrificed in the interests of BBC Radio’s nightly serial The Archers.
Most commentators assumed that Grace’s death in a stable fire while she was trying to rescue her horse was a spoiler for the first night of ITV. The episode had 20 million listeners on the edge of their seats and BBC switchboards were jammed for two days as grief-stricken Archers fans tried to learn more about the event. Some of them wanted to be told that it had never happened.
The storyline was described by one newspaper commentator as “the most cataclysmic event in British broadcast fiction”. Listeners broke down and wept when they realised that Grace had perished. Flowers flooded into the Birmingham studios where The Archers was recorded and the BBC had to put out an appeal asking that no more should be sent.
The death of Grace, who before her marriage had been portrayed as a spoilt, capricious, rich man’s daughter, made headlines round the English-speaking world. BBC executives, taken totally unawares by the outbreak of national grief, hastily ordered a script rewrite so that Grace’s funeral should not be featured in later episodes.
The other member of the cast most affected by Grace’s dramatic death was Norman Painting, the actor who played her husband of six months, young Phil Archer. In the fatal episode she dies in his arms on the way to hospital after a blazing beam crashed on to her head (she had left a dinner party at Grey Gables to retrieve an earring she thought she had left in the car and had seen that the stables were on fire).
He maintained in a Desert Island Discs interview celebrating the 50th anniversary of The Archers in 2001 that the real reason for killing off Grace was to counter accusations that the serial was getting too cosy and predictable.
“So they decided to kill off one of the favourite characters,” he told Sue Lawley. “At one stage it was going to be me. We weren’t given the scripts until just before the recording.” When Ysanne discovered that Grace was the chosen victim, she was not very happy, he said. “In fact she was extremely unhappy. She said, ‘They’ve done it. They’ve done it. They’ve killed me,’ and she was terribly upset.”
Many years after Grace’s death Godfrey Baseley, creator of The Archers, said that his reason for writing out the character of Grace Archer was simply that he wanted to get rid of Ysanne Churchman, whom he regarded as a troublemaker because she wanted to unionise the cast. Another version claimed that the decision arose from a dispute over pay which ended with her slapping his face.
The Daily Mirror asked at the time: “Was Grace Archer coldly and calmly murdered – to rid The Archers of Ysanne Churchman? The BBC know the facts. So does Equity. And, of course, so does Ysanne Churchman. But dead girls can tell no tales.”
Despite her tearful exit from the world’s longest-running radio soap (as The Archers was to become), Ysanne Churchman was brought back to play several other characters in the series, the last and best known being Mary Pound, a Borsetshire farmer’s wife with a deep throaty voice quite unlike Grace’s genteel tones.
The arrival in Ambridge in the last decade of Grace’s nephews, Rex and Toby Fairbrother, stirred up memories for Phil’s second wife Jill (Patricia Greene), who said she felt “haunted” by Grace. “It’s impossible to live in Ambridge and not hear her talked about in hushed and revered tones. The lovely young Grace. The tragic Grace,” she complained to her sister-in-law Christine.
Toby has a child with Ruth and David Archer’s daughter Pip named Rosie Ruth Grace, in Grace’s memory.
She was born on May 14 1925 in Sutton Coldfield, the daughter of Andrew Churchman and Gladys Dale, both well-known as stage and radio performers. At the age of 13 she made appearances in BBC Radio’s Children’s Hour and an early BBC television play, Gallows Glorious. She originally trained as a dancer at the Cone-Ripman School in Tring, Hertfordshire, but after a spell in repertory theatre she went on to specialise in radio and voice-over work. She was a keen campaigner for equal pay for women in film, television and radio.
Her long post-Archers career included appearances in ITV’s Crossroads, the BBC series The Railway Children, four appearances in Softly, Softly and the radio adaptation of A Dance to the Music of Time (1979). Between 1972 and 1974 she was in 15 Doctor Who episodes, providing the voice of the intergalactic diplomat Alpha Centauri.
She retired in 1993 but still made occasional returns to radio and television, and in 2017 she was back to voice Alpha Centauri in the Doctor Who story “Empress of Mars”. To keep the diplomat’s return a surprise, she was not credited in Radio Times.
In 1951 Ysanne Churchman married a senior BBC broadcasting engineer, Tony Pilgrim; he predeceased her in 2015. During Norman Painting’s lifetime – he died in 2009 – the three would meet regularly on September 22 for an anniversary lunch.
Ysanne Churchman, born May 14 1925, died July 4 2024