RED Nose Day - Comic Relief - gets up to many things. The media joins in with alacrity. The BBC in particular goes for it, especially the wireless: I don't know why, but it does. This year Radio 4 brought in its most successful programme, The Archers, and successful The Archers is. For a wireless programme (and Archers fans call it the wireless), this serial is astoundingly successful. Not merely because of the millions of listeners. The fact is that The Archers is the world's longest-running soap.

The Comic Relief and Archers connection is that actress Lucy Davis - who plays Hayley Jordan - is asking listeners to phone the BBC and vote for their favourite episode of the programme, which started on May 12, 1950.

Every Archers listener has no doubt a favourite episode. I listen to the omnibus Sunday transmission; switch off the telephone and cook breakfast. For an hour-and-a-quarter I scream at this overgrown crystal set. I loathe virtually everybody in The Archers. Hayley Jordan is an exception. The only other sympathetic character in this serial one can ever think of is Mrs Antrobus. To choose Hayley for this charity shot was doubtless obvious. Any of the rest of the Ambridge folk would have you robbing an orphanage and stabbing an elderly Little Sister of the Poor.

Davis's request for a favourite Archers episode (0897 556644, 65p out of every quid goes to Comic Relief) has so far met with a response from six-and-a-half million people and me as well. I went for the show in which that greedy little tyke, John Archer, croaked it. He was killed by a tractor just

over a year ago and it was too good for him. Piano wire would have sufficed.

Davis, who is Jasper Carrott's daughter, is hopefully as nice as the character she plays because life wouldn't be worth living if there were really nothing but Archers about to the extent the show suggests.

But what is it about this show? Why do I and the millions of listeners switch off the phone of a Sunday to hear this thoroughly unpleasant saga of agricultural poisoners? Why should there be a massive following in Holland, Belgium, Northern France, and in Cologne, Gibraltar, Cyprus. Israel takes it every week. So does Nepal, for heaven's sake, though not Afghanistan, which banned it for moral reasons years back; for once the Ghilzais show sense.

The Archers started in 1950, in Birmingham. A middle-aged, balding, bespectacled chap called Godfrey Basely, who once played Mr Mayor in the BBC Midlands edition of Toytown, was producing Down On The Farm with early Beeb luminaries on the show - Raymond Glendinning, Wynford Vaughn Thomas, and Gilbert Harding. As part of the BBC public relations operations Basely had conducted meetings of farmers, and at one, in Lincoln, a certain Mr Kenny Burtt of Dowsby stood up and said that as a farmer, in the dark days of rationing and hard times for farmers, ''what we need is a farming Dick Barton''.

In pre-television days radio programes like PC 49 and Dick Barton Special Agent were listened to by millions. But what was more, the Government of the day was very concerned about food and rationing. It jumped at Basely's suggestion of a farming Dick Barton. On May 12, 1950, The Archers appeared: the script editor was a deputy president of the National Farmers' Union; the Ministry of Agriculture was involved from the very first, though it hardly paid the BBC. In fact, the first two years' budget for The Archers was #55 a week in all, actors, production, recording. Today, EastEnders costs over #200,000 a week.

By Christmas 1950 The Archers had five million listeners. In that yuletide week, Sir Stafford Cripps, who had done so much to starve Britons, resigned, and Scottish Nationalists had stolen the Stone of Destiny. But The Archers had transcended national, Scottish or otherwise, concerns. It still does.

Neil Kinnock famously appeared in it. So did Princess Margaret, and Britt Ekland. In 1977, the show went daft and had Nelson Gabriel involved in the Great Train Robbery. From time to time some insane scriptwriter comes up with a melodrama so implausible that listeners like me write to complain about her (Archers listeners always know when it is a ''her'' writing the script - it gets left-wing).

But The Archers is never left for long, or even a minute. It is a constant celebration of greedy farming bastards laced with the stories of poor agricultural labourers who voted Tory, touch forelocks, and have learned to moan even more than their gross and ill-educated overseers. Under-educated? The Archers consists virtually entirely of people who have never read a book and who would make the Philistines look like effete Oxford dons touching each other up in the Cafe Royale.

And, by the way, the episodes of The Archers you've to vote for during that Comic Relief scam are Grace Archer's death, Nelson Gabriel's footwear, Shula grieving over Mark's demise, Julia Pargetter's bankruptcy, and what else - John Archer's death in a tractor. A lot of deaths in The Archers, and well-deserved to boot.