Going Native: Long-Running Television Serials in the Uk
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PRODUCTIONS / MARKETS / STRATEGIES GOING NATIVE: LONG-RUNNING TELEVISION SERIALS IN THE UK DOUGLAS CHALMERS AND HUGH O’DONNELL Name Douglas Chalmers, Hugh O’Donnell to language use throughout this period, focusing on the Academic centre Department of Social Sciences, Media and move from Standard English to a wide range of regional Journalism, Glasgow Caledonian University, United Kingdom dialects during the four decades when these serials were E-mail address [email protected], [email protected] at the height of their popularity, routinely dominating the television ratings. It then examines the development KEYWORDS of long-form serials in languages other than English, Soap opera; minority language; Welsh; Gaelic; Scots. firstly Welsh from the mid 1970s on, and then Gaelic intermittently from the early 1990s to the present day, and finally Scots, a highly minoritised Germanic language ABSTRACT spoken mostly in the Scottish Lowlands. It compares both This article examines in detail the development of the long- the current health and the future prospects of Gaelic and running serial in the UK, from its beginnings on radio in the Scots with a particular focus on the challenges faced by 1940s, through the move to television in the mid 1950s both. Additional insights into the particular case of Gaelic and then up to the present day. It pays particular attention are provided via interviews with a number of stakeholders. 09 SERIES VOLUME IV, Nº 1, SPRING 2018: 09-20 DOI https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2421-454X/8396 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF TV SERIAL NARRATIVES ISSN 2421-454X CONTEMPORARY PROXIMITY FICTION PRODUCTIONS / MARKETS / STRATEGIES > DOUGLAS CHALMERS & HUGH O’DONNELL GOING NATIVE: LONG-RUNNING TELEVISION SERIALS IN THE UK 1. INTRODUCTION specifically Welsh (Pobol y Cwm, S4C, 1974-) – and the first serial in Gaelic (Machair, STV, 1993-1999) would not emerge In this article we provide a historical overview of television until almost a further twenty years after that. To date, the serials in the UK as a whole, showing in particular how the one and only television serial featuring Scots, a Germanic soap-opera landscape came to be dominated linguistically language closely related to English and based mainly in the first by regional dialects of English, expanding later to accom- Scottish Lowlands, appeared in 2002. modate geographically-bounded productions in Welsh, Gaelic Scots is by far the most minoritised of these languages. and Scots. All the serials in this last group can be termed “mi- With only a very small number of exceptions, it is largely nority-language” serials, in the sense that the languages they absent from the broader official public sphere (education, feature are used by a numerical minority of their respective press, politics), and from official communication in general. populations. However, the languages they feature are in fact As Smith (2000: 165) puts it, “While standardized written more correctly classified as “minoritised languages”, a term English subsequently became the educationally enforced (and which applies to any language which is deliberately or even fixed) norm, socio-political and cultural events meant Scots neglectfully deprived of resources for political or other rea- did not develop similarly”. Indeed, it has as yet no agreed or- sons (Hornsby and Agarin 2012). To better understand the thographic rules (Kay 2006). There is considerable uncertain- longitudinal processes which led to the emergence of these ty over the number of speakers of Scots. The most recent UK minoritised serials, we open with a discussion of the chang- census of 2011 suggested a figure of around 1.5 million, but ing linguistic landscape of UK television serials since the mid- this is almost certainly too low in view of the unreliability of 1950s. We show how the language of returning serials chal- much of the data gathered using questions which made little lenge the hegemony of London-based upper-class forms of sense to many respondents; given the low official status af- speech, and discuss how minoritised-language serials – more forded the language – few Scots are aware even of its modest specifically those produced in Scotland – can hope to survive elevation to “regional language” in 2001 (Spolsky 2004: 124) in a broader UK linguistic landscape dominated by the inter- – a considerable number of its speakers do not recognise it national language par excellence, English (Mizumura 2017). as Scots, referring to it instead as a dialect or even as “slang”. On the basis of its own research, the University of Aberdeen’s Scots Leid Quorum cautiously suggested a figure of 2.7 mil- 2. FROM MONOLINGUAL STANDARD lion speakers (Murdoch 1996). Though it stressed that such TO MULTIDIALECTAL/MULTILINGUAL figures required context and hedged them with many caveats, CULTURE this overall conclusion would seem persuasive to anyone fa- miliar with the linguistic situation of the Scottish Lowlands. Until relatively recently, English – more precisely Standard It is much easier to give (relatively) more reliable data in English – was the de facto language of all public commu- relation to Welsh and Gaelic, both of which enjoy a certain nication, including broadcast communication, in the UK. level of official recognition and standardisation. Welsh has This mode of speech was itself part of a highly restricted just over half a million speakers out of a total population of communicative repertoire. In Fairclough’s terms on news- just over 3 million, while Gaelic, which we return to below, casting (rather than serials), it can be considered a form of has around 60,000 speakers out of a Scottish population of “parochialism” (2001: 205), where phonology itself became just over 5 million, in other words just over 1 per cent of the an expression of power. Although other languages and dia- total. This represents a significant challenge in terms of the lects – including regional dialects of English – have always economics of broadcasting, although an increasing amount of been spoken by communities of various sizes, it was not more recent research has aimed to isolate the extent to which until the early 1960s that television serials began to appear the language can be understood as a general business asset which challenged the dominance of Standard English (also (HIE 2014) and as an important economic aspect of cultural known as Received Pronunciation, or simply RP) on UK tele- and media production in Scotland’s Central Belt (Chalmers vision (Coronation Street, ITV, 1960-; Emmerdale, ITV, 1972–; and Danson 2009). The largest Gaelic-speaking communities Brookside, Channel 4, 1982–2003; EastEnders, BBC, 1985-). – and therefore the largest potential audiences for Gaelic- Almost a further fifteen years would elapse before the first language serials – are to be found in the Western Isles of television serial appeared in a language other than English – northern Scotland (officially known for local government 10 SERIES VOLUME IV, Nº 1, SPRING 2018: 09-20 DOI https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2421-454X/8396 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF TV SERIAL NARRATIVES ISSN 2421-454X CONTEMPORARY PROXIMITY FICTION PRODUCTIONS / MARKETS / STRATEGIES > DOUGLAS CHALMERS & HUGH O’DONNELL GOING NATIVE: LONG-RUNNING TELEVISION SERIALS IN THE UK purposes by their Gaelic name Na h-Eileanan Siar), particu- the returning serial as a viable broadcast form. The second, al- larly in the landmass of Lewis and Harris, though there are so a BBC production (radio was a BBC monopoly at the time), also sizeable diasporic groups in Glasgow and Edinburgh. In was titled The Archers. It began formally on 1 January 1951 terms of the production of official Language Acts or Plans (having broadcast five pilot episodes in the previous year) and similar political-cultural initiatives, Gaelic and Welsh and continues to the present day. With its current total of have been treated very differently from Scots. Welsh was over 18,500 episodes, it is the longest still-running broadcast the first beneficiary of a Language Act in 1967 while the first serial of all time. Both of these productions had (and, in the Gaelic Language Act was not published until 2005. No such case of The Archers, still has) a rural setting, something of a plan has ever been developed for Scots. conundrum given that by the late-1940 to the mid-1950s, the The importance of formal recognition of this kind cannot UK was one of the most industrialised societies on earth. We be underestimated in terms of its knock-on effect on broad- return to the question of location below. er cultural production, including television serial production The first television soap opera was the BBC offering The (Shohamy 2006: 62). A striking example of broader cultural Grove Family, launched on 2 April 1954. This was clearly a impact of such initiatives is the case of the Irish language in pre-emptive response by the BBC to the British parliament the Republic of Ireland. Irish – a Celtic language closely relat- having passed the Television Act of that year, a piece of leg- ed to Gaelic and with a broadly similar level of penetration at islation which paved the way for the arrival of commercial between 1 and 2 per cent of the population – has since the television in the UK in 1955. This pattern of public-service founding of the Republic in 1916 always been much better re- channels launching television serials in response to the immi- sourced than its close Scottish cousin: it has since 1916 been nent arrival of new commercial channels would be one which officially the first national language of the Republic (English would repeat throughout continental Europe in the 1990s is its second official language) and as a result enjoys a range (O’Donnell 1999) as a result of the liberalisation of television of advantages which attach to such a status, including the taking place at the time.