One of the original cast of the world’s longest-running soap, Spencer sparkled with charisma – and carried the show through seven decades that utterly transformed British culture

• June Spencer, long-time star of The Archers, dies at 105

On Sunday 14 May, 1950, a cast of actors assembled in a Birmingham studio to record the pilot episode of a new radio drama set in an English farming community. Perhaps they thought little of it. The next day they were back recording a serialisation of something that probably seemed weightier and more significant – George Eliot’s Mill on the Floss. But without much fanfare or even noticeable enthusiasm from BBC bosses, the drama was commissioned, and began regular transmission on the following New Year’s Day. The Archers, a six-day-a-week ritual on BBC Radio 4, is now the longest-running soap in the world. But with the death of actor June Spencer, aged 105, the final link with that pilot is broken.

Give or take a brief break when her children were small, Spencer was a lynchpin of The Archers from that first appearance as Peggy – a cockney girl out of her natural habitat in the countryside, driven to distraction by her husband Jack Archer – until the final episodes she recorded in 2022. Spencer’s voice accompanied the people of Britain from postwar rationing and the tail-end of the horse-drawn plough through the utter transformation of British culture, society and agriculture, the ostensible subject of the programme. The Archers began three decades after the creation of BBC radio. The following 70 years saw the rise of television, the emergence of commercial channels and satellite, and the triumph of the internet, streaming and social media. Through that media revolution, Peggy’s voice – chiding, comforting, exasperated and loving by turns – endured, losing only its London twang.