S4C and Welsh Identity

Debate between Lord Brady of Altrincham and Hywel Williams

Wednesday 7th May 2014 Westminster Hall

[Hywel Williams (Arfon) (PC)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Brady. In the past couple of days, Welsh MPs might have thought that all their birthdays and Christmases had come at once. We discussed the Wales Bill yesterday; we have the Welsh Grand Committee today; and the hon. Member for Vale of Glamorgan (Alun Cairns) has the debate following this one. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Montgomeryshire (Glyn Davies)—I think I can call him that—on securing this important debate.

My constituency has some bearing on the debate, because it is the home of many of the small companies that have produced output for S4C and have provided additional services. That has led to great economic progress in my constituency. I sometimes introduce myself as the Member for Arfon, “where the main industries are tourism, agriculture and TV production.” That sometimes raises a few eyebrows, but it is true, because the TV sector in Arfon is extremely important.

I want to take a small step back into the history of S4C—Sianel Pedwar Cymru as I call it. Forgive me, Mr Brady, if I sometimes slip into calling it Sianel Pedwar Cymru, as that is how I see it, rather than S4C. The hon. Member for Vale of Glamorgan referred to the establishment of the channel in the 1980s. Perhaps I can be the first to pay tribute to Sir Wyn Roberts for his titanic struggle to establish it. As a figure who did so much for the Welsh language, he is still underrated, and I am very glad to pay tribute to him today.

My history of the channel starts rather earlier, at a time when I had long hair, a checked shirt, jeans and clogs. [Interruption.] I know that that is difficult to believe, but there we are. Actually, I can see myself, sometime in the early ’70s, at Hyde Park corner, at a rally called by Cymdeithas yr laith Gymraeg, the Welsh Language Society, listening to my hon. Friend the Member for Newport West (Paul Flynn) and being inspired by him. He is as sprightly as ever of course, but he made a speech that Sunday morning and I thought, “Well, if we can get an MP here to talk, there must be something to this.” It rather persuaded me not to pursue my studies in psychology and sociology and instead to pursue a political course, I am afraid, so I have named the guilty man—guilty to a certain extent—here today.

I would like to say a little first about the function of Sianel Pedwar Cymru. As has already been mentioned, it is a provider of programmes, a publisher and an employer, and it also provides a very useful economic stimulus in parts of Wales that in the past have not received the proper amount of attention in the media. As a provider, it is important that S4C produces popular programmes. Reference has been made to children’s programming, and speaking as a new father, my little son is obsessed with “Cyw” and the children’s programmes, as are children throughout Wales. S4C fulfils a hugely valuable function there. Reference has been made to “Y Gwyll”, or “Hinterland”, as it is called in English. Not only is that a very good programme—in Welsh and English—but, as the hon. Member for Vale of Glamorgan mentioned, it shows the world that we are out there with the best. It is an important stiffener to the spine and a bit of an inspiration.

Seeing as I am reminiscing, I remember being in a sociology conference at some point in the mid-’80s. Late at night—after, as they say, drink had been taken—I was discussing minority language broadcasting with people from the university of Hawaii. We eventually came to the conclusion that most TV was trash, but my contention was that if there was any trash going, it should be also available in Welsh. At that point, we decided to retire. That is a significant point, because the Welsh language has been seen over the centuries as the language of the chapel or of high literature, but S4C has an important function in providing popular material that will appeal to a wide audience.

I will not tarry to talk about S4C as an employer. It is an important economic stimulator. I was glad some weeks ago to be present at the opening in my constituency of the building for Cwmni Da, a hugely important production company run by local people who are now not quite so young. For those who judge companies by the way the people there dress, Cwmni Da is not a tie-and-shirt outfit but a jeans-and-sneakers one, and long may that continue. It is a challenging company.

That leads me on to one of my main points, which is a plea for stability of funding for S4C. As has been said, the planning cycle for programmes is long, and producers need to know that the money is there. I do not want to say that we are coming into another difficult period, because things have seemed difficult for rather a long time. I was part of the discussions on the Public Bodies Act 2011, and there was an existential threat to the channel. The money was going to disappear, and I was glad to work with people from across the House to ensure the channel’s future. It operates under an unusual model, and it needs public money. It shares the model of public service broadcaster with Channel 4 and, peculiarly, it has advertisements, even though it is a public service broadcaster. People outside Wales might not know that we have BBC programmes with adverts on either side, which some people find very strange indeed. It is a creative model that actually works, but it needs certainty to continue.

I want to talk briefly about the cultural importance of S4C, which is what we are discussing this morning. The channel is a means of cultural production and cultural reproduction—that is, of passing culture on to other people—and it defines the culture as well as being symbolic of it. We have everything on S4C from cartoons and rock and roll to religion and opera, and even, in the past, Oscar-nominated films. Television has a supremely important function in that respect.

People from England and the other parts of the UK know the reverence with which the BBC is viewed as the repository of all that is good about culture through the medium of English. S4C has something of that function, but it is even more important in Wales. The BBC is only one producer of programmes through the medium of English among hundreds of thousands across the world, but S4C is the only one that does it in Welsh. In that respect, its fragility is both hugely dangerous to the language and a huge opportunity. It literally makes Welshness.

A historian that I am fond of, Gwyn Alf Williams—I am sure that my hon. Friend the Member for Newport West knew of him when he was alive—said tellingly that Welshness is what Welsh people make. It is a function of our will to continue to be Welsh, and it is something that we create anew every day. Whenever we talk about identity, people make appeals to their ancestry. They say, “I have a grandfather who is Irish, a grandmother who is Scottish, and a second cousin through marriage who comes from Poland.” I have Irish ancestry, although that is by the bye. The important thing about S4C is that every day it makes Welshness apparent anew in a creative and radical way.

When I was preparing for the debate, I had a look at the definition of “radical”. S4C is the establishment embodied, because it is Welshness and it has all sorts of programmes including opera, but it is also a radical channel that breaks new ground all the time. The definition in, I think, “Webster’s Dictionary” said that “radical” meant changing and from the root, and was also a term of approbation among skateboarders. That shows how malleable meaning can be. S4C is radical, and long may it remain so, because it is at its best when it is most challenging, radical and creative. The Welsh word for that, to my mind, is “beiddgar”, which means not only challenging, but challenging the very heights when the chances of success are slim—pushing the boundaries. S4C has been beiddgar in such a way. I think it lost its way slightly, but it is going back in that direction.

Reference has been made to the importance of audience, and it is important, but I simply want to say that all channels are now minority channels. Long gone are the days when the Morecambe and Wise Christmas show could pull in 28 million viewers, or half the population of the UK. It is right for critics of S4C from other channels and from the media in general to recall that all channels are minority channels.

I want to finish with one point. S4C has been important in defining and symbolising the Welsh language over many decades, but we must always bear in mind—I wish there was equivalent action on this point—that we need broadcasting about Wales through the medium of English. I remember surprising one of my Labour colleagues some time ago in a debate about the language by saying that English is a Welsh language. That is literally true for 80% of the population in Wales. I finish with an appeal for broadcasting through the medium of English to be better funded, better resourced and better received in Wales.

[Mr Graham Brady (in the Chair)]

Order. I have avoided setting a time limit, but we should start the wind-ups in about 10 minutes’ time. There are two hon. Gentlemen seeking to catch my eye, and I leave it to them to try to make sure that they both get called.