During this period she cast Trevor Harrison as Eddie Grundy and Sara Coward as Caroline Bone (later Pemberton and Stirling).
According to Whitburn, she was with the programme for four years, during the period Jimmy McGovern was still a member of the scriptwriting team,[4] She became the Editor of The Archers in June 1991.
[7][8] Smethurst wrote that then current plot lines simply did not happen in the countryside, although journalists pointed to real-life parallels.
The racial origin of the South African character Lucas Madakane (Connie M'Gadzah) was not directly mentioned when he was introduced around 2001, which Victoria Mather in The Daily Telegraph thought "bizarre in a gossipy rural community".
[12] Mark Lawson of The Guardian wrote that while any racism in the serial's fictional Ambridge "may be occurring out of earshot", treatment was also dramatically realistic because the issue of a person's skin colour is now seldom referred to directly in Britain.
[10] The 60th anniversary of the programme was billed as containing developments to "shake Ambridge to the core", which turned out to be long-term character Nigel Pargetter (Graham Seed) being killed in an accident.
[16] On Friday 11 February 1994, she had a car accident at 11.30am on Bristol Road near Pebble Mill on her way into work, in her white VW Golf.