Begins with presenter, Richard Uridge, reading an extract from an early episode of ‘Cauliflower Drove’:

Richard Uridge:…let me explain. Welcome to the home of Britain’s latest Soap Opera. It’s called ‘Cauliflower Drove’ and I was playing one of the characters there. A character dreamt up by John Glover-who has a much better local dialect than mine.

Johnny Glover: Oh, I don’t know…

RU: ‘Cauliflower Drove’- Just tell me what it’s about…about the poor chap with the pitchfork sticking through his jacket.

JG: Well, the whole thing was dreamt up about a year ago. I was writing a column for my friend’s website, called ‘The Reg Dixon Diaries’ or ‘World of Dixon’, and I basically got fed up with writing it, so I decided to kill him off. I’d had an idea for a detective story for a while and I liked the idea of someone being killed in the middle of a ‘Fen Blow’ and that was how it started.

RU:…with a pitchfork ! A classic Fenland Whodunit ?

JG: It started from there and it’s grown and grown. I make it up as I go along and I still don’t know how it’s going to end.

RU: ‘Cauliflower Drove’- an unusual name, but I suppose there are a few cauliflowers grown around the East Anglian landscape.

JG: Just around the corner from where my dad’s land is, he used to be a farmer, there’s a road called ‘Cabbage Hole’. So, I thought ‘Cauliflower Drove’. It’s hops along quite nicely like ‘Coronation Street’, so I picked that…It sounded right.

RU: ‘East Fenders’ perhaps ? (laughs)

JG: I hadn’t thought of that one (guffaws)

RU: (chuckles) I won’t charge you for that…! As a Farmers Boy- is this where all the inspiration for the stories comes from ?

JG: Some of it is- the old characters. I used to have a lot of old aunties and uncles and I used to do a milk round and see a lot of these people and we had a lot of elderly relatives and a lot of the stories are about them and the things they used to say. Such as the ‘Safe as a Church tied to a hedge’-things like that.

RU: It’s a nice expression that, isn’t it ? Very safe presumably?

JG: Yes

RU: Looking at the script here- Yaxley Farcett ? He’s a nice sounding character. Who’s Yaxley ?

JG: I used to work for the railway and I used to fall asleep in the back of the van. I woke up one day when we were on the way to Peterborough and there was a signpost saying: Yaxley- 2 miles, Farcett- 1 mile. And it sounded like Sherlock Holmes. So, he was invented. That was about seventeen years ago.

RU: Reading that, it’s in a Fen dialect. Is that an important part of it, in your view ?

JG: It was in the beginning- not quite so much now, because I didn’t want to keep hammering on about it. It crops up now and again. I didn’t want to overdo it.

RU: You wanted to do it…to keep the thing alive ? So that it doesn’t die out in the great media age that we live in, with regional dialects disappearing?

JG: Yes…You mentioned ‘East Fenders’. I find that nowadays a lot of people speak as if they are characters from ‘East Enders’…

RU: (interrupting) Wotchew mean ? Are you talking to me ? (laughing)

JG: (laughs) Yeah ! Do you want some ?!…. This is a bit of a fightback to try and keep a few of the old sayings alive.

RU: Of course, this hasn’t all been plain sailing, has it ? You got into a bit of trouble didn’t you when you were looking for some illustrations for your characters…what happened then ?

JG: When we started putting ‘Colly’ onto the site it looked a bit bland, just six hundred or so words of text, so we decided to illustrate it with some pictures. I’d had in my minds eye that Yaxley Farcett would be this dashing young detective with long hair and a baseball cap, at odds with the locals, so I decided to cast Ewan McGregor in the part.

RU: (laughs-quite loudly I thought)

JG: So, as it said in the Eastern Daily Press, we ‘cunningly downloaded’ the pictures and Ewan McGregor became Yaxley Farcett.

RU: And was he flattered ?

JG: I don’t know- his agent wasn’t !! He was going to get onto his solicitor straight away, but we haven’t heard anything…

RU: They were going to sue the pants of ‘Cauliflower Drove’ and it’s producers ?

JG: Hmm- I think Ewan McGregor was too busy making the ‘Star Wars’ at the time to worry about this.

RU: Well, it might have a lovely symmetry about it if one day this really took off and Ewan McGregor was cast in the role of Yaxley Farcett…

JG: Yeah- I’m hoping that when he’s finished with ‘Star Wars’ he’ll have so much money that he’ll come back and fund this for Channel Four or something.

RU: (giggles and goes onto next item)

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