Reclaiming the British Hinterland for the mainstream

Did you see Hinterland? It's a Welsh detective series currently being shown on BBC4. We'll come back to that.

Its characters switch between English and subtitled Welsh. When was the last time you heard Welsh on television? Britain's second language, and it's never heard by non-Welsh speakers. 1% of the British population speak it, and the other 99% are never exposed to it. Ever. You could go your whole life watching British media and never be confronted with the beauties of Welsh. Not saying the rest of us should speak any, but to never hear it? 

Watching it I caught glimpses of another possible Britain, one in which we are used to hearing other British accents and languages, where they weren't presented as other and strange to an audience assumed to be from the South East of England.  

Hinterland looks beautiful, it's exciting. It's mainstream. Now, I'm not saying it's particularly good; the reviews have been very kind. It was a bit silly, and full of the usual crime series cliches. But it is mainstream. The only thing which is different is it's not entirely in English. It should be on BBC 1, and it was originally shown there (IN WALES) but for the rest of the country it's confined to BBC 4, home of the European drama series. Something which should be completely natural to us has been made niche. 

A similar story with The Fall, a crime drama set in Belfast. The best thing about it, by far, was its Belfast location. But that location wasn't presented matter-of-factly, as somewhere natural to tell a story, but instead made strange through the eyes of a visiting southern English detective, the way in for the assumed (English, Southern) viewer. 

The British countryside looks a lot more like this:

Yorkshire Dales

And this:

Bodmin Moor

And this:

Black Mountains

And this:

Peak District

And this:

Loch Lomond

And this:

Lake District

Than it does like this:

Don't know - England though, right?

Or this:

Kent

And our cities more like this:

Glasgow

And this:

Newcastle

And this:

Leeds

And this:

Belfast

Than this:

Not sure - not a British city by the looks of it

Yet all of Britain is presented as other compared to an assumed South East norm, undermining any sense of British identity. All of the regions feel alienated from "Britain" (i.e. the South East). There's been a decades long propaganda campaign to normalise the un-British ways of the greater London region. Enough! Time to point the finger the other way. We're not different, London, you are. You cockney fucks. 

There is such a thing as Britishness!

With Scottish independence and all that there's been focus on the idea of Britain, and what it means and all the rest of it.

There is a British identity, one which makes sense, with shared history and cultural values. The problem is that this Britain is ruled by, but doesn't culturally include, the English South East.

England just isn't a real country. The differences between northern England and Scotland or Wales are much smaller than the differences between northern England and the south east. The Russian dolls of identity make more sense as northern > British than English > British.

There's a natural brotherhood of the Scots, Welsh, Cornish, (Northern) Irish and Northern English. These guys all have loads in common. Landscape, sheep, post-industrial decline, an interest in folk and country music, tea, fish suppers, reserve, good humour, a shared hatred of London.

An independent Scotland would be sad for the rest of this Britain, but at least some of us will have got out. It's just a shame that it's the wrong bit going its way. That bit at the bottom, the England of Top Gear and Bake-Off and finance and media and royalty and morris dancing and London. We don't need that bit. Also, they hate us.

A nice Britain of 40million, with the capital in, say, York, would be lovely. We could just crack on being a medium-sized European country and relax. England-minor could go its way making money and being "global". Everyone would win.

We've really buggered up how we've organised this place.


ADDENDUM: I don't really know where the South-West fits in, or the Midlands. I'd like to take Birmingham with us but I guess it's up to them.