Television and the local press: formations of value in making must-see TV

This article addresses an under-researched area in the analysis of contemporary broadcasting, namely the public life of Welsh television in the regional or local press. Focussing specifically upon BBC Wales's Coal House (Indus Films), the article considers the importance of promotional discourse in the making of television history. In the process it argues that we need to be attentive to the diverse meanings of multiplatform as a concept and should not discount the regional or local press as a site in which television criticism may be forged and contested. Through textual analysis of over forty press cuttings, the article argues that the press read Coal House through the lens of their own commercial attachment to an imagined community, but that in so doing, they often chimed with broadcasters and viewers' concerns with cultural value and a sense of the past in Wales today.