Carole Boyd on Private Passions with Michael Berkeley 18th July 2021

Carole Boyd is an accomplished theatre actress: she has recorded some three hundred audio books, and she does all the female voices in Postman Pat. But all this pales into insignificance compared with the role she has played on radio for thirty-five years, as Archer's character Lynda Snell.

More than five million Archers listeners have been listening to her as the snobbish but good-hearted Lynda since she first arrived in Ambridge, in 1986. Lynda is the Archers’ theatre director, putting on pantomimes and musicals; and Carole Boyd too is musical, creating words and music shows.

In conversation with Michael Berkeley, Carole Boyd tells the story of how she became an actress, despite the opposition of her family (she applied to drama school secretly) and how she was inspired to create the inimitable grating speech of Lynda Snell by the voice of her husband’s secretary. She concedes that her identity has become somewhat blurred with Lynda’s, and that channeling Lynda’s assertiveness is very useful when doing battle with utility companies on the phone. She admits, though, that she has never got close to a llama (unlike Lynda).

More seriously, Carole Boyd talks movingly about what it’s like to care for her husband, Patrick, who had a major stroke in 2003. She speaks very honestly about the daily reality of life as a carer: the loneliness, the frustration, the mourning for the person you used to know, and still love.

Carole Boyd’s playlist ranges from Schubert and Debussy to The Beatles, taking in Vaughan Williams, Canteloube, and Aaron Copland. We hear too Laurence Olivier with the St Crispin’s Day speech from Henry V.

A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3
Produced by Elizabeth Burke