ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the growing interest in the popular Welsh-language soap opera, Pobol Y Cwm (People of the Valley), and the extent to which discourses of Welshness and definitions of cultural and national identity contribute to the appeal and longevity of the soap. Welshlanguage broadcasting has been largely neglected in debates surrounding popular culture and pleasure in the 1970s and 1980s; little English-language research has been done in Wales, and most Welsh-language research remains unavailable in English. This marginalization is in many ways symptomatic of the larger politico-historical structure that characterizes Wales’s relationship to England; Raymond Williams argues that the process of subordination imposed on the Welsh by the English, in the form of English law, administration, and the suppression of the Welsh language, led to the Anglicization of Welsh institutions. Identifying these processes as “forms of political and cultural colonization,” Williams points to the movement of English capital and management into Wales that slighted the rural economy and internal
needs of the small, developing country.1 As a consequence of these political structures and the relatively recent introduction of
Welsh-language programming on S4C (Sianel Pedwar Cymru/ Channel 4 Wales), a regional television channel introduced in 1982 after considerable Welsh political lobbying, there is a paucity of research conducted into the reception of S4C and how Welsh identity is negotiated
in popular televisual forms.2 Furthermore, critics are generally quick to deride pleasurable
Welsh-language genres and draw upon conventional aspersions on the soap opera genre.3 In order to redress this imbalance, this chapter will trace discourses within Pobol Y Cwm that explore definitions and redefinitions of “Welshness” and contribute to (re-)formations of cultural identity, those codified systems and ideological forms that contribute to the sense of a collective experience based on a range of shared assumptions and ideas. The main areas of investigation are structured around three key concerns: first, the role of culture in contributing to a sense of Welsh identity through an investigation of the social, cultural, and institutional forms of Pobol Y Cwm; second, analysis of textual ideologies in the soap with specific focus on a controversial story-line; and, third, the role of Pobol Y Cwm in the lives of its young
viewers and their understanding of ideological concerns. The three small nations that together with England make up the United Kingdom have been
represented in multifarious forms on national television since the early 1950s. A polemic voiced by many critics is that professionals engaged in television production in Wales are encouraged to merely reproduce “dominant” UK mainstream broadcasting in the Welsh
language.4 Moreover, according to Michelle Ryan, the main concern of the “white, middleclass elite” who run the broadcasting institutions in Wales has been to preserve all that is traditional in Welsh culture, secure in the knowledge that such a policy will not compromise
their allegiances within the British Establishment.5 The form of this relationship between London and regional centers, together with the effect
this “marriage” has had on program content and dominant representations, has been discussed by Colin McArthur in relation to Scottish television. He argues that there has been pressure on Scottish television to privilege an image of Scotland that is nationally marketable. Furthermore, just as British television is increasingly dependent on dramatizations and serializations which will attract co-production finance and international sales, so Scottish television looks for financial and critical approval from London and the independent network. The result is a marketable image of Scotland that confirms rather than challenges the dominant
discourses of Scottishness.6 One of the inadequacies of Scottish television for McArthur is the absence of any sense of
its engagement with a developed notion of national culture or national identity which goes
beyond the reflection of an always already constructed “Scottishness.”7 This criticism is also frequently leveled at Pobol Y Cwm; opponents attack the soap for its presumed lack of engagement with any “progressive” notion of “Welshness,” arguing that Pobol Y Cwm is content to reproduce tried and tested forms of representations that are regressive and vacuous. Absent from these critiques, however, is any form of real engagement with the soap or considerations of its generic conventions and popular pleasure. Critics seldom refer directly to the text and are content to make judgments frequently based on their memory of the program’s early format which was much slower paced (one of the major narrative settings during episodes from 1974 to 1988 was an old people’s home) and appealed to an older audience. Such criticism also raises the vexed question of what a “progressive” Welsh cultural identity might look like.
