The seventies were far from the greatest decade in the history of British cinema, but it was a particularly distinguished period as far as British television drama was concerned. Unfortunately, some of the finest jewels of the period were lost to the misguided policy of wiping videotapes to reuse them, and most of the others have been gathering dust on the shelves of the BBC and ITV archives for the last fifty years, but at least BBC Four have recently tried to remedy the situation by broadcasting a section of vintage dramas, generally on Wednesday evenings.
"How Green Was My Valley" is one of these rediscovered dramas. It was based upon Richard Llewellyn's novel "How Green Was My Valley", published in 1939. This novel has a lot in common with A J Cronin's "The Stars Look Down" from four years earlier. The protagonist of both books is the son of a miner who shows exceptional academic ability which enables him to consider going to university rather than following his father down the mines. Both books feature conflict between the miners and their employers, leading to a strike, and a mining accident in which the protagonist's father is caught up. The two books, however, have different settings in place and time, "How Green Was My Valley" being set in South Wales during the late nineteenth century and "The Stars Look Down" in North-East England during the early twentieth.
The protagonist of "How Green..." is Huw Morgan, the youngest son of a Welsh miner, whom we first meet as a young boy. The serial (which makes a few changes to the plot of the novel) follows the fortunes of Huw, his parents Gwilym and Beth, his three older brothers Ifor, Ianto and Owen, and his sister Angharad as he grows to manhood. The plot is too complex to set out in full, but important elements include the rivalry of Owen and Ianto for the love of the same woman, Marged, Ianto's radical politics and his involvement in the trade union movement (something his father does not altogether approve of), Angharad's marriage to Iestyn Evans, the son of a wealthy mine owner, and Ifor's death in a mining accident.
Another theme is the importance of religion in the Welsh valleys. Iestyn's family are "church", meaning Anglican, but virtually everyone else is "chapel", meaning Methodist. An important figure in the story is the Revd. Gruffydd, the relatively liberal Minister of the local chapel, who encourages Huw's academic ambitions. Gruffydd is kindly and well-meaning, but his relative liberalism brings him into conflict with some members of his flock, particularly the fundamentalist and puritanical "deacons", or chapel elders, and eventually leads to his being dismissed from his post. (The Methodist clergy never enjoyed the system of "parson's freehold", which meant that an Anglican priest could only be deprived of his position for "open and notorious evil living"). In his final sermon he stresses the importance of charity, a virtue in which he implies his enemies are lacking.
Most of the actors involved in the production were Welsh, although there were some exceptions such as Dominic Guard as the adult Huw and Keith Drinkel as Ianto. The three performances which stood out for me came from Gareth Thomas (the future Blake of "Blake's Seven") as Gruffydd, Stanley Baker as Gwilym and Siân Phillips as Beth. This was Baker's final acting performance, apart from an appearance in an Italian television series, before his tragically early death from cancer. Phillips was to give another iconic performance later the same year as the venomous Empress Livia in "I Claudius", a character about as different from the kindly working-class matriarch Beth as one could imagine.
"How Green Is My Valley" is a good example of what the BBC (and at times ITV too) could do so well in the seventies- a gripping drama about the lives of ordinary people. (Another example recently shown on BBC4 is "Sunset Song" from 1971 about a Scottish rural community). I must admit that I have never seen the 1941 film version of "How Green...", the film which controversially beat "Citizen Kane" to the "Best Picture" Oscar, but, the television version showed me what a powerful story this is. BBC4's policy of reviving unjustly forgotten dramas is paying dividends. 9/10.
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