Escape from Ambridge

Angela Piper, aka Jennifer Aldridge in The Archers, is one of Britain’s most famous voices. Yet in France, she basks in solitude

Jennifer Aldridge’s fluting tones travel across the kitchen in her six-bedroom farmhouse as she chats about her family and life in the country while preparing pasta and salmon for our supper. Hang on, though: she’s not referring to moan-a-minute Adam, wringing her hands about wayward Kate or discussing play dates for Ruairi, her husband Brian’s illegitimate young son. And we are at the bottom of a lane in a French hamlet, rather than by the Aga in Ambridge.

Angela Piper, to whom the voice belongs, is used to such confusion: she has been playing the part of Jennifer for 47 years on The Archers, and, for the 4.9m people who listen every week to Radio 4’s “everyday story of country folk”, itself 60 in January, that voice is instantly recognisable. If, however, I had arranged to meet her in a public place and relied on sight alone, I would have looked for a sleek, Jaeger-clad woman who resembled an older Princess Caroline of Monaco, rather than the smiley, 5ft 1in ash blonde with cornflower-blue eyes (they match her baggy T-shirt dress) who introduces herself with a big hug and a kiss.

“Everyone thinks I am tall and dark,” says Piper, 70 (her character is five years younger), handing me a bottle of chilled white wine to uncork. “That’s the fun of a radio character.” It has made it hard to get acting work elsewhere, though, so inextricably are her vocal cords linked with Jennifer. So, last year, she wrote Jennifer Aldridge’s Archers’ Cookbook, complete with her character’s snipey comments: “Lilian’s rich tiramisu: still popular with coffee addicts, although Lilian’s always rather too generous with the brandy” [of her fictional lush of a sister]; “Caroline also calls this a ‘tarte’ — well, she would, wouldn’t she?” [of one of her husband’s former mistresses]. It has sold nearly 50,000 copies.

As long as Piper keeps her mouth shut, being a radio actor has ensured relative anonymity; even the residents of Felsted, Essex, where she lived for 20 years, did not know who she was until a journalist inquired after her in the local shop. She and her husband, Peter Bolgar, 74, a retired BBC announcer, moved earlier this year to nearby Sible Hedingham, also in Essex, so she will have a new set of villagers wondering why she sounds familiar when she asks for a pound of sausages in the butcher’s. “We needed to downsize,” she says.

“It was a large place with 4½ acres.appearance in January on BBC television’s Ready Steady Cook with Charles Collingwood, the actor who plays the philandering Brian, has blown her cover to a degree, but Piper is far from an egotistical luvvie. Were it not for The Voice, you wouldn’t really guess she were an actress at all, just a nice middle-class country lady with a good eye for interior decoration. Vases of garden flowers fill the pale Quercy stone house in the Lot-et-Garonne, southwest France, and, as an attentive hostess, she has chilled the wine just for me. She doesn’t drink herself: a BBC chef gave her and 30 others hepatitis A at an awards lunch back in 1987, and her liver can’t deal with alcohol.

In fact, minus the snobbery and penchant for the cashmere comforts of a wealthy life, she is similar to her alter ego in being devoted to her family — Bolgar, to whom she has been married since 1962, their two sons, a daughter and seven grandchildren. “I’m much duller than Jennifer,” says Piper several times, although she’s actually miles jollier and more fun. “I like the simple things, really, the comfort of my home. I like the seasons, to go back to the same place and see the changing of the year.”

There’s certainly plenty of nature to observe in this gentle, rural part of France, a mile or so outside Beauville, near Agen. As we eat supper on the wisteria-clad veranda, the frogs below join in loudly every time our voices raise above a murmur, although they seem to be the only locals up much later than 9pm. Unlike in Ambridge, there’s no Bull pub; L’Aubergade, a three-Michelin-starred restaurant, is a 10-minute drive away in Puymirol, but the basic menu starts at more than £100 per person, so it’s hardly somewhere you visit on a regular basis, however much you might hanker for Michel Trama’s famed foie-gras hamburgers.

All this suits Piper fine, as she is perfectly happy to spend a week alone, reading, catching up with old friends and going for walks down the ancient lane that runs along the lower edge of their 2½-acre property to a lake below. Bolgar, meanwhile, is back home looking after their elderly labrador and supervising work on the new house.

In contrast to Jennifer, whose life has always been centred on Borsetshire, the Bolgars have had holiday homes since their children were small.

Recording in Birmingham in blocks of six days a month has given Piper flexibility, and the family’s first foreign property was in Minorca, which they owned for 25 years. It was by the sea and they spent their days sailing or on the beach.

They eventually tired of Minorca — “It is a small island” — selling up five years ago. They already had a toe on French soil, though, having bought a tiny village house four years previously near the walled town of Carcassonne, where the couple could escape for short breaks on their own. No longer possessing a house big enough for family gatherings, they started to look beyond the Languedoc.

An internet search led them to the present area, where properties are well built and a reasonable size: this one has a double-height drawing room, five bedrooms, three bathrooms and a swimming pool. “I fell in love with the house, its views, its quietness and its solidity,” Piper says. Built in medieval times in a commanding hillside position, it was once fortified. A pavilion, designed by their architect son Ben, 42, who works for the Prince’s Foundation as senior design director, blocks out the modern farmhouse next door.

The house, which Piper thinks — she’s not sure — they bought for about €580,000 (then about £400,000) in 2006, was owned by a British lawyer, who renovated it to a high standard. She and Bolgar have put on a new roof, done up the bathrooms and added a double guest suite on the lower ground floor. It comes with its own front door, sitting area and little kitchen — perfect for guests who want independence.

Back in England, the plan had been to move nearer to Mimi, their doctor daughter, and her family. They wanted a place in Hampshire or Sussex, ideally not far from the sea. “I yearn for water,” says Piper, who also dreams of owning some woodland to manage. Having sold the Felsted home in a day, however — “a premium house in a premium village” — they failed to find something suitable in the area and went for the landlocked Essex house instead.

There is much work to be done, and the couple feel there is little time to enjoy the French house, so they are selling reluctantly, with the hope that, one day, they might find another holiday property nearer the sea, one that can host the whole family. Although the present house is wonderfully easy to open and shut up, and has a pool and fields to explore, the area is not exactly buzzing. “It is all right for quiet old people to sit and read a book,” says Piper; but not quite enough to tempt their offspring with young children and other choices.

Where will she look next? As with questions about what is going to happen to Jennifer in The Archers — who, for all she knows, could end up under a tractor next month — Piper is giving little away. “I’ve really no idea,” she says. “One step at a time. The house is on sale for €750,000 (£626,000) with Lafite Scholfield; 00 33 5 53 95 97 28, lafitescholfield.com

Hear Angela talk about her home, and see more photos, at thesundaytimes.co.uk/home

Writers name

Caroline Donald, The Sunday Times 06-06-2010

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