Razprave in gradivo, Ljubljana, March 1986, No.18 =~ 
E.0. Williams ypc 32315 (429) 1621-397 
BBC Cardiff 
United Kingdom 
A TELEVISION SERVICE FOR SMALL LINGUISTIC COMMUNITIES: THE WELSH 
EXPERIENCE* 
I will begin with a fable; a fable of our times. It is set in a 
small village nestling in a valley in North Wales. The Second 
World War is over and the village has lost four of its sons. But 
its youthful population has increased and the school is bubbling 
and thriving with an influx of evacuees from Liverpool. 
Aggressive young children, confused and homeless, temporarily 
orphaned. Children who were sucked into a rural community where 
Welsh was the language of existence and survival as well as 
leisure and culture. It was a village of quarrymen and farmers, 
shopkeepers and merchants, six teachers, two non-conformist 
ministers, a doctor and a vicar. Life was structured and ordered. 
Socially it centred around the chapels and school. There you 
found culture. And on the football field over the river you'd 
find recreation on Saturdays. It was tight, oppressive and self- 
sufficient. Transport was three buses a day, morning, noon and 
evening, and a taxi run by the garage. The village of 500 people 
had twenty cars to be used sparingly for keeping in touch with 
the outside world. And there were eighteen telephones spread 
around. 
But the seeds of a new community had been sown before the war and 
the six years of darkness from 1939 to 1945 had nurtured the 
seeds of change. The quarrying of slate was no longer viable even 
where the slate itself could be moved quickly to the point of 
sale, The green hillsides had become a darker shade after the 
planting of conifers by the Forestry Commission. The aspirations 
of parents had become an avaricious greed for their children's 
education. The beast of rural depopulation was about to go on the 
rampage. Because implicit in the desire fora better education 
was a belief that the children would get a better education was a 
belief that the children would get 4 better life ee ns 
village. There was no expectation that children who wie Pie 
the way to college would ever return to enrich the villag i ee 
i : fice to the gods 
The village was making the supreme sacri S the demand for 
Progress and sending its young talent to fee a 
education and care in Liverpool, Birmingham and London. 
rew up to 
It is against this background that chee Eon: Up to the 
adolescence. They were called Elwyn, Garet t existed for them. 
age of ten, life outside the village had no enerated by 
Without electricity, other than tha ho went to bed at eight 
machinery owned by two eccentric sisters i the village street 
and who didn't believe in machines on Sunday: 
fter the 
; ight years 
lighting obeyed blackout instructions 07 8 mue intensity and 
À na 
end of the war. Not, of 2 
ee 
* Original: English 
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activity which are necessary for progress had disappeared from 
village life and getting a reliable electricity supply just 
didn't seem to be worth the effort. There were a few wet-battery 
driven radios (or wireless sets, then) that kept the news and 
Radio Luxembourg beaming in, but it all seemed so very distant, 
so very far away. Elwyn, in fact, was taken by his mother and 
father to his cousin in Chester to see the coronation on 
television in 1952. That was the first time he'd seen it and he 
had amazing tales to tell his friends about this wondrous machine 
that people had at home in the cities. 
The development of the three boys from children to adulthood is 
interesting but, regrettably, not relevant to the fable we have 
to tell. We need now to move thirty years on and see the three 
boys as men before we return to that village and see the process 
of change that took place - the process which is fundamental to 
our attitudes as broadcasters and educationalists during the 
1980s if we have a concern for the quality of life in sparsely 
populated areas. 
Our fable moves to the present. Elwyn is a producer of programmes 
in the Welsh language which are transmitted on S4C. He is based 
in the suburbia of Cardiff, part of an elite band of University 
graduates who create and plan a television service for those 
sparsely populated areas that sent them away to be educated. He 
now lives in an active hard-working community that is as 
competitive as it is creative. 
Tom lives outside London. His inclination and education were 
fulfilled when he developed an outstanding career in the high 
technology of engineering. He has developed equipment which has 
made it possible to transmit and receive television pictures at 
the same instant throughout Europe. And he's not finished yet. 
His command of digital technology is such that the quality of 
picture and sound that can be distributed to communities all over 
Europe, including the small village of his childhood, will reach 
unimaginable heights of sophistication just as the hardware gets 
cheaper and cheaper. The totality of the new leisure available to 
the unemployed television viewer is the high technology 
revolution which is now contracting this small world and Tom is 
one of its leaders. 
Gareth stayed at home. He, too, is a leader. But in the small 
community which nurtured him. He failed to reach the educational 
heights of his two friends and took over his father's business. 
He now runs the only shop in the village. There isn't any other 
work there. Apart from looking after the cottages now owned by 
city dwellers and used as bolt-holes for weekends and summer 
holidays. Most of the native community is unemployed. They speak 
Welsh together and have a television service to educate, inform 
and entertain them. They have a radio service which does the same 
and both together span the whole day from 6:00 a.m. to 11:00 p.m. 
They have the world at their fingertips through the instant media 
in their first language. But their second language is English and 
their favourite newspaper is the Sun. Gareth is a leader in that 
community but finds that when he watches television Dallas and 
Dynasty are infinitely more exciting than programmes in Welsh. In 
fact, on S4C, he hasn't seen any of his friend Elwyn's 
programmes. There was one series, however, that really grabbed 
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him - "Minafon" - a tough realistic portrait of a little village 
just like his own. In fact his village is a familiar location for 
film-makers for the channel and one drama shot there has been 
sold to six European countries by S4C. But these are incidental 
to the bubbling cauldron of this small village in a sparsely 
populated corner of North Wales. 
Under its sad decrepit veneer which romantic poets, folk singers 
and politicians have bemoaned in their songs, poems and speeches, 
the village lives again. Rejection had become a way of life for 
them. They had turned too many cheeks. So much of what was pumped 
through the media was patronising, an educational elite was 
speaking from ivory towers. A community needs a morality, needs a 
structure, needs a culture. But this must grow from the guts of 
that community and blossom through its talents. 
The garden of the fifties was left without the gardener. Nature 
in the wild took over carefully manicured lawns and a jungle of 
weeds was a new environment. Weeds are more robust, more able to 
adapt to the chill winds of the economic climate. The traditional 
culture was not sturdy enough without the tender care of the 
gardeners. A new sub-culture is being born. The chapels are 
silent. The reality of music is in the carburetor of a jalopy 
racer, painstakingly tuned in the long leisure hours of 
unemployment. The exhausts blow raspberries around narrow roads 
and farm fields, where traditional moralities cannot withstand 
the destructive pleasures of alcohol and hard drugs. 
In his study in Cardiff suburbia Elwyn ponders‘the problem. How 
does he create better programmes for sparsely populated areas - 
like the village of his birth. In his workshop in London's 
suburbia Tom is feeding the computer with more information which 
will develop the technology still further to bring more choice 
and better pictures to those communities that moulded his youth. 
kr * 
There ends the fable of our times. Come with me now to examine 
some of the truths that were contained in it. Let's begin with 
Tom's Truth. The revolution which we are all involved in is 
technology-led, The consumer has never demanded the sort of 
sophistication that fibre optic cable and Direct Broadcasting by 
satellite can bring. And yet for sparsely populated areas the DBS 
technology could bring television services to enhance the quality 
of life. Technology is simplistic in that sense. It travels in 
Straight lines. It equates improvement and enrichment with 
proliferation. It moves on the basis that progress with 
technology equals civilisation. Often that is the case but it is 
not necessarily so. It was that particular equation which started 
depopulating rural areas in the first place. It is that equation 
which is now de-humanising the industrial valleys of South Wales. 
If you actually believe that the grass is greener on the other 
side of the hill because they have found a new fertilizer then 
you will never find the way to making the green green grass of 
home even greener. 
There is a sense in which DBS is the answer to the problem. There 
iti i imi i fidence in 
needs to be a positive discrimination to restore con 
rural areas. It was seeing other places with better amenities 
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that sucked the life-blood of rural areas in the first place and 
the footprint of the monster in the sky goes some way to 
restoring the balance. DBS does not differentiate between one 
community and another on any grounds. But therein lies the 
problem. It is the most potent destroyer of culture and 
individuality since the Roman Empire. American culture and the 
English language dominate the programming. The economics of 
television and film production make it a commercial necessity to 
seek large markets and DBS transmission has that power. So does 
Fibre Optic Cable, but the installation costs would be 
prohibitive for sparsely populated areas, and the proliferation 
of choice offered would need to be counterbalanced by enough 
funding to allow native cultures, particularly where they are 
based on lesser-known languages, to be carefully developed to be 
competitive with the main languages that have a better economic 
base in the market-place, 
In many ways the British broadcasting structure is to be admired 
and perhaps in this particular respect to be emulated by other 
countries. This brings me to S4C. Whilst its autonomy to provide 
a television service is guaranteed by Act of Parliament its 
programmes are funded from the two sources of revenue in the 
British system. The BBC, funded by licence, provides ten hours of 
programming per week from its resources in Wales, including a 
comprehensive international news service. The other 13 1/4 hours 
per week are produced by the ITV company for Wales (HTV) and 
Independent Producers - small. companies situated in all parts of 
the country (particularly in North Wales). These programmes and 
the running of the service are funded by a subscription made on 
the profitable ITV system (as is Channel 4 outside Wales). This 
is a civilised way of dealing with minorities that cannot find a 
high enough budget to compete with the popular networks with 
large audiences. Once the present balance is disturbed it is this 
service, and any other minority service, which will be destroyed. 
There is a debate at the moment centred on the notion that the 
BBC should take advertising. Whatever benefits might ensue (and 
no-one is clear whether there would be) the destruction of S4C 
would certainly be an undesirable consequence. Broadcast 
television in Wales is a four-channel system - three channels in 
English and a Fourth Channel with its peaktime programmes in 
Welsh for 23 1/4 hours per week and the other fifty hours are the 
programmes of Channel 4. This subscription, which reduces the 
taxable profits of ITV companies, is in fact based on their 
profitability, and although they do not like to part with 32 
million pounds annually there is a sense in which this makes ITV 
a true public service. Is it worth the money? In truth it cannot 
be done for less. You cannot provide a service under 22 hours per 
week and it must contain music, drama, animation, sport and all 
the other expensive ingredients which have made the English- 
language services so popular. With S4C now selling its programmes 
to over sixty countries throughout the world I think we can say 
that the talent exists in Wales among Welsh speakers to create 
programmes that have universal as well as particular appeal. 
But the programme maker's first role is to create material that 
will appeal to the immediate constituency - the Welsh speakers 
living in Wales. If the quality of the product has a wider 
appeal, then that is a bonus. It is now becoming clearer that the 
future will need a greater pooling of resources on a European 
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scale so that quality can be maintained and enhanced without the 
escalating cost of production, S4C must prepare its Welsh 
speaking viewers for a direct link-up with mainland Europe in 
drama, documentary and light entertainment so that co-productions 
can be developed which will enrich the language and the 
communities where it is spoken. The technology that makes this 
possible is infinite in its possibilities. 
The problem is that educational systems have tended to separate 
the arts and sciences over many generations and the philosopher, 
theologian and poet have a deep ignorance of technology, and vice 
versa. As a result of this division there is a chasm between the 
concepts and demands of different kinds of society on the one 
hand, and the natural development of technology on the other. It 
is my view in the communication field (at the moment) every 
problem is surmountable. If the problems aren't set by the 
philosopher and poet then technology will run wild and instead of 
realising its potential as the ultimate civilising force of the 
twentieth century it could end up destroying the society which 
gave birth to it. 
There is a vortex on the horizon of our awareness. A black hole 
for society where the raw materials of civilisation - the 
relationships of people in a community - will run dry and not be 
replaced because a new breed of man, a creative elite, will 
Produce all entertainment, education and information, and the 
technologist will communicate this so effectively that no-one 
will see the need to replenish the raw materials. It's a bit like 
planting a forest and not phasing and replanting. Elwyn and Tom 
in our fable share this problem, but, unfortunately, they will 
never understand it without Gareth. Gareth, who stayed at home. 
No matter how sophisticated our measuring techniques become for 
gauging audience size and audience appreciation they do not help 
us to understand the undercurrents of what is happening in 
sparsely populated areas. Any measuring technique needs centres 
of population; small villages in rural areas can have behavioural 
patterns which are quite different from the urban conurbations 
which control the responses to a television service. The 
responses may or may not be the same but it needs an 
understanding of the psychological and emotional state of a 
community to be able to break through any barriers which build up 
when a group feels deprived of certain things. And these areas 
have been made to feel deprived. The older generation already had 
its base when the technological revolution started but the 
younger generation living and growing in these areas today has 
been made to feel second class as the harsh economics of the last 
twenty years has demanded larger, more centralised units. It is 
to this generation, the age group between 16 and 30 that 
programmers need to turn their attention and to attract them to 
the channel and work with them to improve the quality of life in 
the community. To do this we must accept that there has been too 
much patronising, too much romanticising and a lack of positive 
attitudes from programme makers in the past. 
The positive, indeed aggressive marketing of the language in the 
anglicised communities of South East Wales during the same period 
has had good effect on attitudes to the Welsh language and 
increased its usage. The Welsh learners are committed ambassadors 
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on the frontiers of two cultures. But the rural communities have 
seen a lack of awareness of the state of the language. And 
political activity connected with its protection has tended to be 
negative and narrow. The majority of people under 35 have been 
alienated by this approach. It lacks the charisma of the language 
movement of the sixties and early seventies and has a certai 
Puritan seriousness which is not appealing to the mass. . 
The fact is that it can also be counter-productive. By 
associating the language with intense commitment a large 
proportion of young people have escaped to other forms of 
entertainment which are not language-based. The proportion who 
have followed a more formal higher education will still retain 
the commitment to the language whilst enjoying themselves but 
even Welsh rock music is not as powerful as it was in providing 
the identity which the others need. Alcoholism is increasing in 
these areas as is, tragically, the use and abuse of hard drugs. 
The trafficking of drugs through the North Wales corridor is a 
horrific phenomenon of the eighties which we have featured in 
current affairs programmes. 
How does the programme maker, educated and alienated from this 
background, communicate effectively? I believe that, of the three 
aims of broadcasting - to educate, inform and entertain - there 
is now a clear priority for our times. We must, above all else, 
entertain. That is the base line. We are well able to educate and 
inform - after all that is how our education moulded us. But 
there is a distinct lack of style and lack of pizazz in our 
approach to entertainment. When people are being entertained they 
are responsive to the other elements. With a proliferation of 
choice they will not wait to be educated. If they are not 
captivated by what they see those who do not have the commitment 
will not wait. Although you may believe that this is a Welsh 
issue, I can assure you from viewing many, many hours of European 
programmes geared towards small communities and minorities, that 
the problem is universal and is certainly of immediate concern. 
The long-term problem is this: if broadcast television ceases to 
be the medium of the people and a unifying force which develops 
the civilisation of communities; if it ceases to attract this 
generation to view, then by the turn of the century it cannot be 
used to create a climate for peace and understanding or any other 
laudable reason to the future, In the U.K. there has been a rapid 
increase in the use of video cassette recorders; nearly two in 
every five households have one. And in the village of our fable a 
van comes around once a week to replenish the viewing. The tapes 
represent the talents of film-makers, many of them, 
significantly, expressing themselves in the nastiest kind of 
horror film. This may well be a passing phase, but it shows a 
lack of rapport with the needs of the audience at this particular 
moment in history. The strains and stresses of our changing world 
have made monsters and perverts more attractive than reality. The 
consequence, some believe, is a destruction of society. No-one is 
denying that it is a factor in changing the traditional attitudes 
and morality. 
We are beginning to understand the problem. As yet we have no 
answers, but as time passes the programme makers will reconnect 
to their roots. They will cease to believe that people have a 
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duty to understand them and begin to take literally the meaning 
of public service television. Returning to the fable for a 
moment, Elwyn and Tom have to take on the attitude of the servant 
before they can once again communicate with Gareth. They must 
accept that their education does not given them a right to 
patronise those who did not move to the centre of influence, 
There is an institutional arrogance about broadcasters which has 
created a gulf with the viewer. When imported American material 
is more effective than home-produced, we must take notice. If we 
are talking about Upstairs/Downstairs in society, the broadcaster 
must go down below very soon before he can function properly and 
use the privileged position to the benefit of society. 
So there we are. A television service for sparsely populated 
areas is no longer a problem for technology. It is an exercise in 
understanding the nature of the communities that are to be 
served. An exercise which will have the profoundest effect on the 
future of language throughout Europe. An exercise which makes the 
S4C experience in the early eighties significant. Technology can 
take us one of two ways - centralised and standardised or to 
service individuality and differences. But either way it must be 
guided. This guidance is beyond the scope of political dogma. 
but it is a problem that will not go away and is common to all 
the communities of Europe. No-one should see themselves exempt 
from playing a part in the debate about and the consideration of 
the fundamentals of the future of civilisation. We need, over the 
next five years, to arrive at a vision of society which can 
provide a framework for technology in communications before "mere 
anarchy is loosed upon the world." But it should not be faced 
timidly or negatively. It is our privilege to be part of the 
revolution that is taking place. As Wordsworth said of the French 
Revolution: "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive / But to be 
young was very heaven.’ 
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