WalesWatch — the IWA blog
Delilah and the Welsh Victim Culture
John Osmond suggests that the current controversies surrounding Tom Jones’s 1960s hit song betray an atavistic Welsh culture of defeat: Delilah has always been notorious in mythology, emblematic of traitorous tempters. Now she is becoming notorious in contemporary Welsh politics. In the book of Judges, in the Bible, it is recorded that Samson loved Delilah, she betrayed him, and, what is worse, she did it for money. Samson became Delilah’s victim. It is significant, therefore that in the famous, perhaps infamous Tom Jones’s 1968 hit Delilah, she herself is made the victim. She is a 'whore' who becomes the victim when knifed by an aggrieved lover:
I saw the light on the night that I passed by her window
I saw the flickering shadows of love on her blind
She was my woman
As she deceived me I watched and went out of my mind
My, my, my, Delilah
Why, why, why, Delilah
I could see that girl was no good for me
But I was lost like a slave that no man could free
At break of day when that man drove away, I was waiting
I cross the street to her house and she opened the door
She stood there laughing
I felt the knife in my hand and she laughed no more
My, my, my Delilah
Why, why, why Delilah
So before they come to break down the door
Forgive me Delilah I just couldn't take any more
She stood there laughing
I felt the knife in my hand and she laughed no more
My, my, my, Delilah
Why, why, why, Delilah
So before they come to break down the door
Forgive me Delilah I just couldn't take any more
Forgive me Delilah I just couldn't take any more
Tom Jones’s Delilah has achieved notoriety twice in Wales in recent weeks. On 21 March, the day of the Wales-Ireland game, culmination of the Six Nations championship, Plaid Cymru’s Helen Mary Jones went on Radio 4's Today programme to complain that the song, with its themes of prostitution and violence, was an inappropriate anthem to be sung from the rugby terraces.
Then last week Labour MEP Eluned Morgan used the hit theme on her controversial video, denouncing Tories and Plaid, but in her own words: “Why, why, why vote Tory?” and “Why, why, why vote Plaidi?”
What is it about this tune, and the lyrics, that so appeals to the Welsh psyche? Can it be something to do with a Welsh obsession with defeat and victimhood? Over generations this has been an abiding characteristic of Welsh society and politics. Unlike the Scots, for instance, we have no memories of successful wars of independence and the experience of institution-building that ensued. Instead, we have memories of the death of Llywelyn ap Grufudd on 1 December 1282 and the collapse of the embryonic Welsh state which he created.
Since then, what have been thought of as distinctive Welsh institutions or impulses, such as Methodism or trade unionism, often brought into Wales and inflected with an intense passion, have in fact been much more complex. As Raymond Williams so perceptively observed in his 1985 essay Wales and England, “Unless we relate [this phenomenon], at every point, to the long experience of defeat and subordination, we project a quite false essential autonomy.”
There have broadly been two Welsh responses to this culture of defeat. One has been resistance, but a resistance that never quite succeeds. The mythology around Owain Glyndŵr exercises its power just because his campaign was essentially one of resistance, and one that ultimately failed, though Owain himself was never decisively defeated. He just disappeared.
The second response has been what we feel to be the Welsh characteristics of warmth and intimacy, concern for the underdog, egalitarian values and the socialism arising out of Methodism – all characteristics associated with the iconic 20th Century politician Aneurin Bevan.
So can it be just coincidence that Eluned Morgan’s and Peter Hain’s new website is named directly after these two legendary figures?
How else can we explain what seems, on the surface at least, such a crass attempt on the website to demonise opponents? Remember this happened once before, but last time it was the other way round. In the run-up to the 1997 general election, when defeat stared the Tories in the eyes, they put up billboards around the country representing Tony Blair with a distorted grin, looking like the devil incarnate. Now on its new website, Welsh Labour depict Welsh Tory leader Nick Bourne as Dracula, with vampire teeth jutting from his mouth. Can it be that it is now Labour’s turn to be staring into the eyes of defeat at the forthcoming European, Westminster and Assembly elections – all due to take place over the next two years?
It's time Welsh politics moved on. Now we have our own home-growing institutions - in the shape of the National Assembly, the Welsh Assembly Government, and an emerging legal jurisdiction - we have less and less excuse to be labouring under a sense of subordination to England.
John Osmond is Director of the Institute of Welsh Affairs.
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Welsh politics seeks Obama moment
An 'Obama moment' could be far off in Wales, says Nick Morris:Recent forays into the online world by supporters of Welsh Labour and Plaid Cymru have set Welsh blogs a-typing. There have been rumblings of optimism about the internet's democratic potential since President Obama's campaign, when he gained millions of online followers and generated donations of more than $500m online. But there is evidence that the enthusiasm engendered by Obama’s campaign was shortlived.Since then the holy grail of internet political campaigning has been to achieve an ‘Obama Moment’ – a great re-invigoration of politics, driven by the people, through the great democratising influence of the web. However, new American academic research, mentioned in the New Scientist, has thrown a measure of cold water on the feverish excitement about the new era of online political activity. Prof Henry Brady from the University of California, Berkeley, has come up with the stats, based on a survey of more than 2,200 people just before the US presidential elections last year:
* Traditional, offline political activities vary with income: almost 80% of those in the wealthiest fifth of the US population are involved in these activities, compared with less than 40% in the poorest fifth.
* The gap in the equivalent proportions for online political activity were 60 per cent compared with about 10 per cent, even accounting for age and internet access.
It is widely thought that Facebook users have fairly diverse socio-economic backgrounds, so there is some potential for the internet to correct the social and economic imbalance in political participation. However, there are few signs that this great revival is close at hand – least of all in Wales.
Nick Morris is Research Officer at the IWA.
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Stimulating statistics
James Foreman-Peck on keeping track of Wales's position in the world:
Statistics can be exciting. A recent radio programme pointed out that one twentieth of Llanelli’s population was now Polish. And the only Wales-based UK Government department – the Office for National Statistics – was immersed in controversy recently over no less interesting proportions. However, media reports of ministerial anger over the release and supposed misrepresentation of immigration statistics may not have been the excitement that the ONS wanted. Not yet the same object of condemnation, a no less august institution has been deploying statistics arguably to the detriment of Wales’ world image. The Economist magazine, founded in 1843, and opinion-former of the business elite on both sides of the Atlantic, produces an annual compendium entitled ‘Pocket World in Figures’. Here can be found lists of the richest countries in the world, that Iceland is where human development peaks (and that in Sierra Leone human development achieves its nadir), that Afghanistan has the fifth fastest population growth in the world and the West Bank and Gaza the twelfth fastest.
Lithuania is revealed to top mobile phone ownership, with 138 subscribers per 100 population, and the UK beats Japan into second place with the greatest spending per head on music sales (including downloads). Estonia and Slovakia tie third in the press freedom ranking while the UK lies twenty fourth.
Also, there are country statistical profiles showing that for instance, Slovenia, Estonia and Latvia all have populations smaller than Wales. But Wales does not get a country profile, nor in general does it have an entry in the country rankings of TV ownership (top scorer United Arab Emirates), car ownership (Luxembourg takes first place) and almost all the rest. Wales is instead represented by the United Kingdom.
For some reason The Economist does make an exception in the national obesity rankings. The percentage of obese men in the Welsh population at 18 percent is far less than the 24.0 percent of English or the 31.1 percent in the US. Unfortunately this achievement does not carry over to the younger generation. The 18 percent of obese teenage Welsh girls takes Wales to number four in this league, while boys (21 percent obese) attain eighth position in the world. Teenage cannabis usage and alcopops consumption are other high Welsh scores. But thereafter Wales disappears from the rankings, replaced by the UK.
Is this a fair representation of Wales’ position in the world? More Welsh data is certainly available to make the comparisons, in addition to the unfavourable selection chosen, beginning with population and GDP/GVA per head. Thereafter the Economist might search for other no less interesting comparators that would allow Wales to rise up the positive international rankings.
In view of its social and economic importance, sport warrants an appearance of some sort, and in an international rugby index Wales must stand a chance of getting in the top six. Under music, also, an index such as choral societies or choirs per head of population would surely be a case in point. Then entirely new headings might be created.
Were the Economist to recognize this statistical opportunity, not only would they spread useful knowledge, but they might even excite or stimulate an expanding Welsh readership.
Professor James Foreman-Peck is Director of the Welsh Institute for Research in Economics and Development at Cardiff Business School.
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A risk worth taking
Nick Morris considers how neighbourhoods could be made more child-friendly:
Parents and grandparents in Wales think that children today have less freedom than they themselves had as children, according to an IWA study for BBC Cymru Wales. Not only was this sentiment strongly expressed among the adults the IWA spoke to, but it was also repeatedly raised without prompting and widely shared among two generations of parents.As a father in north-east Wales said: “Today’s children have lost their freedom. When I was growing up we had the opportunity to go out and find our own things and learn things ourselves but today parents keep them in sight and they don’t get the chance to learn for themselves.” A mother in one of the south Wales valleys described the feelings of a number of parents and grandparents very well: “In my opinion I don’t think it's safe, you know, to go out and play.” The subject of risk seemed to run throughout discussions about play and freedom. They resonated particularly strongly with all generations who took part in the IWA’s snapshot study. Parents and grandparents in particular were aware of their responsibility to balance the children’s risk and freedom.
And while ‘stranger danger’ was cited as one concern, there were also strongly expressed feelings that somehow media coverage of children’s welfare in the public sphere was exaggerating the extent of the danger and causing fear out of proportion to the risk. One mother said:
“Today we have to bear the pain of the world, you know. Our parents, it was just the people they knew, but now it’s everything: one disaster after another. Every child and we have to take all that on-board and in a way that makes it very difficult to feel safe.”
At an every day level streets seem designed all too often for the convenience of car use. Mark Page, a lecturer at the Institute for Transport Studies at Leeds University, noted this when speaking to the BBC:
"If you look around at pedestrian crossings here and in other cities in the UK, crossing times are not generous. Often where those pedestrian crossings are is where there's the greatest amount of vehicle traffic."
The era in which nearly all children can freely play in the roads around their homes has gone. Yet, this does not mean that children's freedom to play has been lost forever. With this newer world we will need new designs to create an urban environment in which children can play more freely and safely.
If a child’s freedom to play and to develop can be curtailed by the physical environments in which he or she lives then town and street planners are, therefore, public health officers of a kind. Their designs can influence the way children play and so how children can learn to evaluate risk, the development of their social skills, their physical health and general sense of wellbeing. Crucially, as with the Victorian town planners who sought to design cities for the good of public health, the responsibility falls primarily on local authorities to ensure plans meet health requirements.
One particular obstacle to creating urban environments that allow children to play more easily is a culture of risk aversion, not just about town and highway planners but more generally in government. The UK and Assembly governments’ document, Manual for Streets (2007) says:
“Risk and liability are major concerns for some highway authorities when considering innovative designs. However, such designs can achieve high levels of safety. Risk can be managed by designing to clearly established objectives and reviewing the result using a quality audit.”
Exemplar developments are crucial. Once the public and planners can see designs executed and working effectively, then a new culture of risk management can be created to replace risk aversion. Because a culture is created by the daily decisions taken by many different people involved in a process then it is perfectly possible to change that culture through influencing those daily decisions. Someone has to take the initiative to start to create a new culture, but they do have the backing of the UK and Assembly governments if they meet the guidelines described in Manual for Streets.
It seems rather ironic that in trying to encourage children to learn how to evaluate risk by ‘just going and out and playing’, we have to first adapt our own approaches to risk to make neighbourhoods and streets fit for this purpose.
Nick Morris is the IWA's Research Officer.
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Ffos Las – a focus for west Wales’ economic development
Peter Davies reflects on the opportunities for the west Wales economy presented by a new race course:In recent times horse racing in Wales has been limited to the borderlands of Chepstow and Bangor on Dee and the sprinkling of well attended point to point meetings across rural Wales. This is all to change from June 18th with the opening of Ffos Las race course, built on a restored open cast anthracite mine outside Trimsaran.The first new turf race course in the UK since in the 1920s, it will be a visible sign of the growing role of the horse racing industry to the rural economy of Wales. The growth in the number and successes of our Welsh horse race trainers has largely gone unnoticed. The likes of Peter Bowen, Evan Williams, Alison Thorpe, Tim Vaughan and Keith Goldsworthy now competing at the highest level in the sport, not only bringing more sporting success to Wales but providing a real employment stimulus to the local economy. The passion and entrepreneurial leadership of Dai Walters has led the £20m investment in a new racecourse which can be the focal point for the new industry in the heartland of west Wales. The area has all the characteristics that has made the industry such an integral part of the economic growth of our close neighbours in Ireland. The high rainfall, the good growth of grass, the rolling landscape, the strong equine heritage, accessibility to large centres population and a thriving tourism industry.
Jon Williams, the race course manager at Ffos Las, expects our home based trainers to face stiff competition from across the Irish Sea and from the high profile training centres across the Severn Bridge. All of which brings opportunity for the west Wales economy, and ambitious plans future development on the race course to include hotel development. equestrian centres and a racing school.
The first race meeting will be a Ladies Night on June 18th, with the official grand opening on August 28th. For further information go to the Ffos Las race course website.
Peter Davies is Chair of the IWA's west Wales branch.
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Speaking up for Wales
John Osmond reports on the political relevance of a weekend conference that took a backward glance at 1960s Wales:Those who need confirmation that writing and politics are intertwined in the life of a nation should have been at a lively Academi conference at the Wharf pub in Cardiff Bay over the weekend, a retrospective on ‘It started in the Sixties’.What, may you ask, started in the Sixties? A lot of things, of course, including flower power, the Beatles, moon landings and, allegedly according to Philip Larkin, in 1963, sex in the wake of the Lady Chatterley obscenity trial. But for Wales it was a pivotal decade, the hinge of the 20th Century. Modern Welsh politics began in 1966 with the twin events of Gwynfor Evans’ by-election victory in Carmarthen in June, followed by the Aberfan disaster in October. They were unconnected, of course, but in different ways set in train movements that still reverberate today. It seems to me no coincidence that Poetry Wales was founded in 1965 and as the decade wore on drew to it a new generation of writers who together produced what its first editor Meic Stephens called the ‘second flowering’ of Anglo-Welsh poetry. It was this period that was being celebrated by the Academi conference.
The key figures were Harri Webb, Raymond Garlick and John Tripp who all, one way or another, returned to Wales from some kind of exile. Following national service in the aftermath of World War II and more than 20 years in a variety of humdrum journalistic jobs in London, John Tripp wrote of his ‘return’ in 1969:
This time when the train pulled in
my ticket wasn’t torn in half.
I’d bought a single back to the beginning
where people live at room temperature
and shop girls call you ‘love’. ‘Return’ in The Province of Belief, 1971
There were, of course, many other poets associated with Poetry Wales, notably Glyn Jones, Gwyn Jones, Leslie Norris, John Ormond and Emyr Humphreys. But it was the first three who deliberately set about deploying English language verse to inject some backbone into Welsh national consciousness. As Harri Webb quipped in one of his salvoes, perhaps more accurately ‘squibs’:
Sing for Wales or shut your trap –
All the rest’s a load of crap.
‘Advice to a young poet’ in A Crown for Branwen, 1974
Webb, as Meic Stephens has noted, described himself as a “poet with only one theme, one preoccupation”, whose writing is “unrepentantly nationalistic”. Raymond Garlick, who returned to Wales in 1967, was more cerebral. But his trilogy of verse collections A Sense of Europe (1968), A Sense of Time (1972) and Incense (1976) describe a nationalist perspective on Wales as an integral part of European civilisation
In political terms John Tripp, whose work was the main focus of the conference’s discussions, was less straightforward. Certainly he had a strong sense of wishing Wales to achieve greater autonomy. But this was tempered by an equally strong socialist sentiment and a feeling that a gross materialism was undermining the essence of what Wales had been and could become. Unlike the others Tripp was not a Welsh speaker (although English Garlick learned Welsh and became a passionate supporter of Cymdeithas yr Iaith).
All three poets were crushed in different ways by the result of the 1979 devolution referendum. Garlick ceased writing at all for many years. Webb announced sometime afterwards that henceforth he would write only in Welsh. For Tripp it was another instance of Wales letting him down. He had returned in 1969 to survive as a freelance writer and barely did so, scraping by on a solitary Arts Council grant, occasional commissions, work as literary editor of Planet magazine during the 1970s, and his increasingly celebrated, sometimes outrageous readings – although he only got drunk after the events.
Despite it all, these three poets, and especially John Tripp, inspired a new generation of poets and other writers, as the weekend conference demonstrated. Tripp remained an indispensable figure during the cultural and political revival of Wales in the 1980s, until his early death at 58 in 1986. His funeral and wake, organised by the Welsh Union of Writers, was a memorable, if somewhat raucous occasion. The Swansea poet Nigel Jenkins, organised it and later produced an excellent short essay on Tripp’s life and work in the Writers of Wales series in 1989.
Jenkins spoke at the weekend, recalling a complex hellraiser of a man who in his private, personal moments with friends could be extraordinarily tender. So did the University of Glamorgan’s Professor of Poetry Tony Curtis who delivered this year’s Gwyn Jones lecture on Tripp, intriguingly titled ‘The Meaning of Apricot Sponge’. You will need to read it to discover the elixir of its meaning. But soon you will be able to, as it will appear as an Introduction to a collection of John Tripp’s prose work that Curtis is collecting.
“I was born in Bargoed in 1927, and I want to know why,” Tripp used to say. He cut a swathe of mordant wit throughout his life in Wales during the '70s and '80s with questions such as these. And with Dylan he refused to go gently “into that good night” and did his fair share of raging at “the dying of the light”. Famously he grabbed a few spare bottles of wine at the fag end of a literary party at Dannie Abse’s home in Porthcawl and hissed, “It’s not over yet!”
Signing his Collected Poems to me in 1978 he wrote, “To John O. What is the Welsh problem? Let me know…” The fact that in 2009 we are still asking questions like these owes a great deal to Tripp and the other poets of the 1960s ‘Second Flowering’.
John Osmond is Director of the IWA.
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Broadcasting Smoke and Mirrors
Euryn Ogwen Williams says Wales is entitled to £30m from the BBC’s digital switch-over fund to kick start English language programming: If we examine the small print of the recent increase to the BBC’s licence fee, to take account of the costs of digital switchover, it is possible to make a strong argument for investing some of it in future in English language broadcasting for Wales. This essential need has recently become lost in the argument over who does what and which channel should benefit.However, £130 million will become available in the next few years, when the digital switchover has been accomplished. We in Wales should be making the strongest possible case for a fair share. I calculate that this would be of the order of some £30 million. And as I argue below, if used creatively, this could plug the gap in English language programming that is occurring as a result of the decline of ITV Wales. Wednesday, 21 January, the day after Obama’s inauguration, was a good day to bury bad news but a strange choice if you wanted to say something important. The something important was the result of a lengthy consultation about Public Service Broadcasting in the digital age. In equal proportion to the overwhelming significance of the previous day, people were underwhelmed on Wednesday. It seemed that the consultation process had been derailed in the last few months by global economic and financial events. This is no time to be brave and begin the reconstruction of a sector. As long as the BBC is there, let’s not risk losing everything. Indeed, at a time like this, the nation needs its comfort zones and, whatever its weaknesses, Auntie provides the comfort that banks and government cannot.
Eventually, the economic crisis will pass and life will return to a different kind of normality.
Unfortunately, the relentless march of the digital revolution is irreversible and, even worse, the pace is quickening. Looking at 21 January 2009 from that aspect, makes it appear like a good day to bury bad news. Most journalists, even those working in broadcast media, are struggling to pick their way through the complexity of all of this and most people don’t really care, so the accomplished smoke-and-mirrors announcement by Ofcom passed with little interest.
Ofcom gets high marks for managing a no-win situation with great skill. Clearly, the regulator like the broadcasters knows how to use audience research to get them out of trouble. ITV slipped quietly of the game, the BBC got a temporary reprieve on top-slicing the licence fee and Channel Four found itself splashing around and looking for shallower water. However, the top marks go to S4C for pulling the masterstroke with their elegant news supply idea, which provided Ofcom with the distraction to get away with a solid but uninspiring announcement.
In Wales, we haven't yet learnt the skills of participating in consultations. The art of committee is writ large into our DNA, so we think that consultations are about a consensus, delay and diffusion. We understand how a small group of determined people can use the committee structure to slow things down or to get their own way and make it look like democracy. We've all done it, haven't we? Consultations, unless you're actually running them, are not like that.
Certainly, they provide a cloak of democracy to centrally generated ideas if there's nothing new and exciting out there. But when there is a good idea, the process of consultation will identify it and fast track it through the system. The failure of individuals and institutions in Wales to understand that this process is about getting shiny new ideas and not about prearranged consensus caught many on the hop.
Our best consensus view was to ask for a few million pounds a year to maintain the old institutions - it would be too cynical to suggest that these were the institutions that gave us the problem in the first place. We should not assume that creativity ends when institutions falter. The digital universe is full of Welsh content on government sponsored and corporate websites or on You Tube. There’s a lot of Welsh creativity out there. The problem is that there’s no one place to find it and, as a nation, we find it difficult to think outside the box of hierarchies and institutions.
Consensus and digital do not blend well. At the heart of the digital revolution are the concepts of individual choice, competition, plenty, niches and change. It is not the technology that drives the revolution but the consumers and citizens taking control of their media. It’s a geodesic revolution which threatens the rationale of traditional top-down broadcast media. And when S4C threw in their rather elegant solution to ensuring plurality in news provision for Wales, many analogue establishment pundits and journalists lost the plot. By the time Lord Carter’s report was published on 29 January, highlighting the S4C idea as something that could work in the other nations, the analogue thinkers went bananas. Individuals seemed personally offended that they had not been included in the thought processes of S4C. BBC Wales’s Dragon’s Eye became a corporate vehicle to discuss the rights of S4C to suggest anything without discussing it with the BBC. Respected journalists and broadcasters ignored 86 pages of a report that changed the very nature of communications in Britain because of one sentence. This was the one that said that S4C had dared to think outside the analogue box about the future of public service broadcasting in Wales and the complex relationship of the two languages in a bilingual nation. Really, it was all very sad.
Plurality of news supply is important. We have it, just about, in English at the moment but are in danger of getting less of it as ITV’s viability is threatened and the Western Mail’s readership declines. In the Welsh language, we have none. One newsroom is the source of all radio, television and online news as well as 50 per cent of broadcast current affairs in Welsh. Why shouldn’t S4C be concerned about that now? It’s been concerned about it for 28 years. Far more worrying are the behind-closed-doors discussions in an ‘advanced stage’, we are led to believe, between ITV Wales and BBC Wales about sharing resources. Now that is a threat to plurality. Any journalist with bottle willing to take this one on?
What will happen to Channel 4? Will RTL buy ITV and free Channel 5 to join with Channel 4 and BBC Worldwide to form a large group that can match the BBC and provide a new commercial model for PSB? Will the Competition Commission say no, as it did to the Kangaroo joint venture of BBC, ITV and Channel 4, to provide an on-demand viewing platform? That was a serious blow to the consortium, which had spent £20 million in developing the platform and had come up with a catchy brand name – SeeSaw.
Some believe that these problems are not relevant to Wales. Believe me, they are not only relevant but critical. Structures for digital communication have relevance beyond geographic boundaries and whatever we do to develop plurality in public service broadcasting in Wales, we must not arrogantly believe that we can do it in isolation.
On the last Monday in February, Lord Elis Thomas, Presiding Officer of our National Assembly, threw his wet rag on the fire: more smoke! Was this the BBC striking back, I thought? How could I be so cynical? Speaking in tandem with the Chairman of the BBC Trust in Cardiff he said that S4C should be devolved because it was to do with the Welsh language. By the following morning this was BBC Wales’ big news story. Nobody else’s big story, it must be said, but by the evening bulletin it even had the political correspondent, very corporately, hailing it as “floating an interesting idea”.
The old ideas are the best. This old chestnut has done the rounds many times before and the political response is usually, “Only if you take the whole of broadcasting”. By the following day, the idea had withered. The Llywydd’s problem was that by using the Welsh language card he should have included the transfer of responsibility for Radio Cymru as well, but he probably couldn’t do that as a guest of the BBC. However, honour had been satisfied. The BBC had got its own back on S4C. The two institutions had their tit for tat and the media village had a bit of excitement. Sadly, from the public response to Radio Cymru’s Taro’r Post, it didn’t excite anyone outside that circle. It had been a diversion.
This hyperventilation over news left the rest of public service broadcasting breathing quietly into a paper bag. A pity, because that is a real concern. Our culture and drama, which give us our identity, hardly exists on screen at all in English. There are plenty of bits and pieces coming from a sub-culture that distributes on the web, but very little of that creativity or talent reaches the television viewer through ITV or the BBC in Wales.
The institutional approach isn’t really working any more, and the sooner we accept this, the better. There are fundamental issues of funding, distribution and carriage to be resolved, but there is a great deal of creativity in Wales and there are business structures to support that creativity. The range and depth of S4C’s schedule demonstrates that. So let’s concentrate on the real problems and be open to the possibility that they can be solved in the digital way, bottom-up.
While the traditional institutions were talking the talk, and traditional media gurus were lost in the angels and pins debate, a young web development company from Cardiff, Cube Interactive, quietly went about the business of bidding for a chunk of new spectrum on the Wenvoe transmitter when it switches over in March 2010. Ofcom had advertised this widely because it’s the equivalent of three or four TV channels and a couple of radio stations in the Cardiff area. But Cube won the licence because it was the only bidder. Great news for those who see the digital future as different from the analogue past, and it highlights how quickly this change is happening outside the traditional thinking.
At the end of last year almost nine in every ten households in Wales was viewing digital television from satellite, Freeview or cable. In just over a year’s time, it will be very close to 100 per cent and analogue will be yesterday’s standard. The issues around broadband delivery and take-up will remain for another few years but the market, with some public intervention, will sort them out. Universality, one of the fundamentals of public service broadcasting, is not an issue on one platform or another. But the opportunities of digital communications will only be realised when it is recognised that consumers and citizens in Wales are already in the driving seat. Ownership of mobile phones, the level of text messaging, the proliferation of ipods and wireless access points around Wales are a clear indicator that at grass roots level, the technology does not intimidate people. We know that there’s always been a generational aspect to the adoption of new technology, but it is less so with digital gadgetry.
There is a way forward if we begin to think less about channels and platforms and more about content and how to pay for it. In the digital future that is coming at us very fast, we will soon be able to design our own personalised channels. There will be less of a need to worry about a dedicated English language channel for Wales. Each of us will be able to create one for ourselves, using a developed version of the ‘On Demand’ function to itemise the kind of programming we want to see and when we want to see it.
This personalised ‘On demand’ provision will scan the myriad channels that are on offer and select from them the programming we specify, including content about Wales. What we need to do therefore, is to ensure that there is a varied amount of English language Welsh content available for it to be downloaded on to our screens – whether it be current affairs, documentaries, interview series, talk shows and the rest.
The one area where inevitably there will be difficulty in ensuring a supply of English language Welsh content is drama, since this is so relatively expensive. However, there is a source of funding which Wales should have an entitlement to, which would be enough to make a start in providing an on-going supply of the rest of television’s traditional fare. Suitably, this should come from the BBC’s digital fund surplus. Recently, the licence fee was increased by some £130 million a year to enable the BBC to pay for the Digital Switchover. Once we have crossed the Rubicon to this digital future within the next 3 years, this money should be deployed to provide extra public service broadcasting content from alternative sources.
Ofcom floated the idea of using it to help Channel 4’s funding gap and also to fund news on ITV in the Nations and Regions. The BBC quite naturally, were a bit negative about using its licence fee to support other institutions. Yet this money was clearly not given to the BBC to support its institutional needs, either. So let's find the arguments and the political will to fund public service content where it is most needed. £30m for news in the Nations and Regions and £100m divided equitably between the devolved nations of the UK would bring us back to par with 1970s and 80s spend on English language programmes from Wales. On a population basis that would mean a £30 million Welsh share. It would also address the democratic deficit in the nations and make it much easier for UK broadcasters to meet their quota obligations on programming from the Nations.
This should be the core of building a new funding resource to provide English-language Welsh content for the digital age.
To streamline the process of getting the funds into content, a small business tendering team should tender strands of provision to consortia and companies for a contracted price over a set period. The division of the strands for tendering would be done through consultation with existing cultural institutions and audience research. Crucially, the competing companies or consortia will have to provide details of their contracted arrangements with different broadcasters and distributors, (including UK networks) as well as providing their quality assurances on editorial and business matters before bidding for a tender. The distribution need not be confined to traditional television channels, it could also be web-based. Why not use some of the fund to launch a Welsh web-based English language news and magazine service, akin to the Huffington Post in the United States?
It would make sense to place this new tendering team, that will not be making subjective commissioning decisions, within the framework of S4C since its structures and support systems are already in place, and could easily be adjusted to take account of the new service, both in terms of operational requirements and governance issues. S4C also may have access to broadcasting platforms which could be utilised for the new provision.
We are in the middle of a digital revolution, with a lot more to come, and the people of Wales need to be helped to grasp the opportunities. This is not the time to lose the connection with the citizens and consumers, who are driving the revolution by their take-up of the hardware and applications of the digital world. To believe that people don’t understand what’s happening and can’t make their own decisions when confronted by choice is a serious error. The technology is getting cheaper, smaller, more powerful and easier to use. Moreover, their own content is getting cheaper and easier to create. We need to ensure that we have the mechanisms in place, not only to allow us to receive transmissions in the digital age, but the opportunity also to ensure that a reasonable proportion in Wales is made by ourselves and about ourselves in the English as well as the Welsh language.
Euryn Ogwen Williams is a media consultant advising on the development of digital technology. Has worked as a producer in ITV, BBC Wales and as an independent; he was S4C’s first Director of Programmes (1981 – 1991) and has since advised the Gaels in Scotland and the Irish on developing television services in lesser used languages.
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