Can we buy The Bull, Hen?
Posted: Mon Aug 19, 2013 8:26 am
A pub which helped inspire the legendary BBC radio soap The Archers has been put up for sale.
The Old Bull has been put on the market for £89,000 after landlords Lyn Fishburn, 62, and Mike McCarthy, 60, decided to call time. Mr McCarthy, who has been a landlord at the pub for six years, said: 'We have decided to sell up as we are now looking for a bit more time in life now.
The popular pub has been put on the market for a cool £89,000 'Times have changed, running a pub is a young person's game now. 'We have achieved what we wanted to achieve and we have always enjoyed the link with The Archers. 'It is a traditional pub and we get a lot of tourists taking pictures, they come here because of the BBC soap. 'It is a unique pub and we have had a great time here, I have been a landlord for 45 years and it is time to call it a day.' Lyn added: 'It's a really special place. 'Everybody that comes here falls in love with it - and that's exactly what happened to us when we came.
'I'll be really sorry to go, but I know it's time. 'For me, the highlight of the last six years has been meeting the locals. 'We've got some lovely villagers and we have people coming in regularly from the tennis club or coming in after a shoot. 'But I've also really enjoyed meeting all the tourists that come here. 'We have lots of people visiting us just for our attachment to The Archers. It's not a huge pub - it's a small pub that gets very busy. 'They tend to arrive expecting to see the cast behind the bar, pulling their pints, expecting the radio programme to be played out here. 'We've had the BBC do photo-shoots at the pub. It's quite a unique place to work.'
Dating back to the 1600s, the black-and-white, half-timbered building is also rumoured to have been a stop-off point for William Shakespeare when he travelled to Worcester to collect his marriage certificate.
The Archers was the brainchild of Godfrey Baseley, then the producer of agricultural programmes for the BBC Midland Region. At a 1948 meeting in Birmingham, a farmer told him he should create a radio drama covering the many problems of country dwellers. It eventually hit the airwaves in the Midlands in 1950 and since January 1, 1951, five 15-minute episodes (dropped to 12 and a half minutes in 1998) have been transmitted each week, at first on the BBC Light Programme and subsequently on the BBC Radio 4.
