Ever since Granada closed the Coronation Street tour 20 years ago, there’s been a gap in the market. Many have yearned for British broadcasting’s answer to Disneyland, a soap-related simulation offering actors in costume, trivia about how it was made, a really competitive general knowledge quiz and an experience culminating in a gift shop featuring, ideally, branded chutney.

And now here it is: the Archers experience at the BBC’s headquarters in Birmingham. There’s no chutney sadly and you’ll be lucky to spot an actor, but still.

The superb, unflappably knowledgable tour guide, Holly Baumont-Wilkes, 28, stresses how many of her visitors emerge damp-eyed. “There was a lady who told us it helped after her husband died. She couldn’t bear to eat alone. But she found if she put the Archers on in the background, she could eat – because she felt surrounded by friends.”

Holly tells me her grandmother listened to every episode of the Archers, bar one. “That was the day she gave birth to my mother.” But it is Holly’s nan’s fondness for the show that has passed down the generations: “She died when I was five but I feel this connection with her since there are actors on the Archers who she would have heard. It’s a bond.”

But there’s a problem. While the Coronation Street experience offered the chance to sup a pint of Newton and Ridley’s in a mocked up Rovers’ Return before staggering home tired but happy over Corrie’s cobbles, the Archers experience has no such option. They never built Ambridge, more’s the pity.

Who’s there? A collection of doorbells for each Archers’ property. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian

Instead, visitors will get to recreate an iconic Archers scene and take the recording home as a special memento of the visit. And there will be a quiz to show off and test their Archers knowledge and find out who really knows their Aldridges from their Grundys.

That’s all good, but if I can’t really see the roof at Lower Loxley Hall from which Nigel Pargetter fell to his death in 2010, what is the point of the Archers tour? The answer to that comes when Holly shows me into the Dead Room. “It’s also known as the anechoic chamber,” she explains. It was here that Nigel’s death was recorded.” Holly plays back the clip from that episode and then deconstructs how the scene was made.

The Bull pub in The Archers serves up Lego bricks for ice cubes. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian

We stand for far too long micro-analysing a wall of doorbells, each with a different ring for a different house. We look at a box of cut-up audio tape that can be used to evoke hay, straw and, if the “spots effect” artist runs her fingers through the tape just so, the sound of the ocean. “It’s important to get these details right. If Grey Gables front door rang with the Bull’s bell, there’d be trouble.” She pulls out a box with a piece of wood on top, puts a glass on top and throws some Lego in it. That’s a gin and tonic with ice, she tells me. The Archers, unlike many radio dramas, uses such old school devices a lot; it’s part of its charm. That said, when they pull a pint of Shires, you hear a recording from a pub.

“Did you know,” says Holly, that hot and cold water sound different when poured? “They do and if we pour cold water to evoke tea, listeners have complained.” Archers fans sound like a right bunch of geeks. “They can be. And I am too,” she says. “My obsession is theirs.”

As we tour the studio, we stumble across two of the show’s stalwarts. James Cartwright’s PC Harrison Burns and Joanna van Kampen as Fallon Rogers have been filming a bedroom scene for a tour promo film. But you wouldn’t do that if you were recording a bedroom scene for radio. “We certainly lie down, because your voice sounds different in that posture,” Joanna explains. James offers me a piece of brioche. “Just put a little in your mouth. That’s the trick. We use food like bananas or brioche when we talk with our mouths full.”

Ambridge abridged? Visitors at the tour record their own scene from a 1950s’ Archers script. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian

The weirdest thing about acting on radio? “You don’t look at the person you’re talking to,” says James. The nicest thing? “The anonymity. You wouldn’t get that on EastEnders. Mind you I was in Venice the other week and a gentleman overheard me and said ‘This is going to be embarrassing if we’re wrong, but aren’t you on the Archers?” Joanna, who’s been Fallon for 20 years, loves the job because in part it enables her to take other acting gigs without being typecast for her soap role.

They once billed the Granada Studios tour as Hollywood on the Irwell; maybe the Archers tour could be the Tinsel Town just off the Inner Ring Road.

Birmingham was once the city of a thousand trades, exporting guns and slave chains around the world; now add to that the six-times-a-week soap that has broadcast more than 18,000 episodes since it premiered in 1951. It’s been the queen of soaps nearly as long as Elizabeth has been Queen of England.

“Theres a risk of the Archers becoming pure nostalgia for 50s Britain, but I’m happy to say it isn’t. It’s become much more diverse, much more reflective of 21st-century Britain,” says James.

BBC tour guide Holly Beaumont-Wilkes in the anechoic room where – RIP – Nigel Pargetter’s death was recorded. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian

To get a sense of how it’s changed, we perform three scenes from the 1955 episode in which Grace Archer died in a fire. Holly plays the original recording – scarcely a rustic accent, still less a Brummie one. I play John, who tries to restrain Phil Archer from rescuing his wife from the blaze. I’m not saying I’m a natural, but if I don’t get a Bafta I’ll stop my licence fee direct debit.

The Archers experience has been an unexpected treat – one that gives an insight into how radio drama works and a poignant sense of the history of the British cultural institution. That said, I hope they get the merchandising right. Jill’s flapjacks, bottled Shire, a map and a new run of the Chad Valley-made Archers board game. Eddie Grundy’s greatest hits on digital download.