Meic Povey
Welsh dramatist and actor who had a recurring role in Minder
MEIC POVEY, who has died aged 67, was a playwright who managed to combine the writing of soap operas with more substantial work for Welsh theatre and television; taken under the wing of Gwenlyn Parry, the eminent Welsh dramatist, and employed in the drama department of BBC Cymru at a time when the theatre in Wales was enjoying something of a revival, he was encouraged to write prolifically in his native tongue and became one of the most distinguished names in the Wales.
His name was synonymous with Pobol y Cwm (“People of the Valley”), the immensely popular soap-opera which was launched in 1974 and is still running, the longest of its kind anywhere in Britain. The series reflects daily life in a fictitious Welshspeaking village somewhere in west Wales. Povey, as scriptwriter, introduced more contemporary themes into the plots and a racier tone to the dialogue.
He was able to make entertaining, watchable television not only out of the quiddities of village life but from discussion of more challenging issues such as violence, crime, sexual misconduct, divorce, and problems associated with drug and alcohol abuse.
Critics were fond of pointing out that everyone in the village seemed to have slept with everyone else in ever-more bewildering combinations since Povey had been taken on as one of the regular scriptwriters, which was only a slight exaggeration.
Meic Povey was born on November 27 1950 at Nantgwynant near Beddgelert, now in Gwynedd, and grew up on the Llŷn peninsula. His parents were Griffith Parry, an agricultural worker, and his wife Margaret. He returned regularly to his native patch but the influx of English-speakers into Snowdonia and, as he saw it, the subsequent loss of community weighed heavily upon him, and this concern sometimes surfaced in his plays as dark humour.
From the mid-1970s he was obliged to live in Cardiff, where BBC Cymru is located. Although generally concerned with impoverished people living on the periphery of society, in his series Teulu (“Family”), set in Aberaeron on the Cardigan coast, which he co-wrote with Branwen Cennard, he presented a more glamorous, frivolous side of Welsh life, critics describing the series as “Dallas by the sea”.
Another success was
(“Living a lie”), a political drama that imagines a Welsh Assembly run by a rainbow coalition of Nationalists and New Conservatives known as the Democrats, with the Socialists in opposition, in which envy and treachery drive the politicians and adultery is almost a way of life.
For the stage he wrote hard-hitting plays such as Hogia Ni (“Our lads”), about soldiers returning from Afghanistan. Nel deals with family tensions to do with the inheritance of land, between an older generation attached to traditional ways and a more affluent, rootless younger generation for whom such things do not matter much. Sul y Blodau (“Palm Sunday”) was based on the story of the detention without charge of some 50 Welsh nationalists during police investigations into the burning of holiday homes in Wales.
Povey was also an actor in both Welsh and English and was best known to television audiences across Britain as DC “Taff ” Jones to Patrick Malahide’s DS Chisholm in the popular ITV series Minder (1982-89), in which role he managed to convey a sense of grit underneath wry humour. In A Mind to Kill, which went out in both languages from 1994, he shared the credits with Philip Madoc in a similar role.
He published an autobiography, Nesa Peth i Ddim (“Next to nothing”), in 2010.
Meic Povey’s wife Gwenda died in 2007.
He is survived by his two stepchildren.
Meic Povey, born November 27 1950, died December 5 2017