A snapshot of English grief and bereavement behaviour seen through two short scenes, forty years apart, from the BBC Radio series ‘The Archers’

This paper explores trends in English grief and bereavement behaviour through two short scenes, forty years apart, from the BBC Radio series 'The Archers'. Recordings of the two scenes will be played, the first from 1955 when the well-known young character Grace Archer died in her husband Phil's arms after a fire in the stables, the second when Phil comforts his daughter Shula after the death of her husband Mark in a road accident in 1994. The themes that emerge are: stoicism and internalisation of feelings ("life must go on'), a strong sense of collective loss (the long shadow of war) and an absence of listening in the earlier scene, contrasted with greater openness, listening and validation of feelings of the individual, in the second one. This mirrors well the trends identified by historian Pat Jalland in 20th century Australia and the UK (Jalland, 2006). There is a sense of grief as a process of re-integration of the dead person into the narrative of life of the living to some degree in both stories (see Walter, 1999).