8. Plaid Cymru debate: Broadcasting

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 5:00 pm on 28 February 2018.

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Photo of Gareth Bennett Gareth Bennett UKIP 5:00, 28 February 2018

Well, I suppose the point that I've raised, or I've tried to raise, is, 'Does one thing impinge on the other?', so that may be what we need to consider. 

Now, we do have this—. Right, Doctor Who, we could have bilingual road signs in Doctor Who, but, obviously, we're not going to go there. They go to planet Mars. It's clearly not supposed to be set in Wales. 

So, we have this perceived problem of programmes being made in Wales not being specifically about Wales, which is what we've been talking about, but it is questionable, I think, if a massive percentage of people in Wales will be really interested in watching programmes made about Wales, which is a point that Suzy Davies touched on earlier. After all, since the 1970s we have had things like Radio Wales and Radio Cymru, but it's still a fact that today more people in Wales listen to Radio 1 and Radio 2 than they do to Radio Wales and Radio Cymru. There is an old saying that you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink. You can provide these services, but you can't force your listeners to listen to them. 

Now, these issues are not new by any means. In the 1970s we had issues where people in south-east Wales had to choose whether to tune their tv sets into the Mendips transmitter or to Wenvoe. I grew up in a household in Cardiff where we were tuned into the Mendips, so that the Welsh channels were all fuzzy and we didn't really watch them. So, we had BBC West instead of BBC Wales, meaning that we watched Points West from Bristol as our evening news programme, rather than Wales Today, which sounds ludicrous today, but that's what we did and that's what many other people did, too. 

So, the thing is that you have your Welsh-speaking areas in the west of Wales. [Interruption.] Yes, you have Welsh speakers in Cardiff, too. But the point is that east Wales is culturally not too dissimilar from England. Culturally speaking, people in south-east Wales and north-east Wales have virtually no separation from people in north-west England and south-west England. Now, with the advent of devolution, as well as digital tv, you might have thought there would be more of a Welsh cultural focus in Wales. But digital tv means you're not restricted to just a handful of channels, so people are watching all sorts of things. It's not just that more people in Wales are watching Eastenders and Coronation Street instead of Pobol y Cwm; you've probably got more people in Wales watching The Walking Dead than Pobol y Cwm, so we may slowly be becoming a cultural colony of the USA. 

So, these are the problems we are having to grapple with in the modern world. I don't think you can hamper film and TV production by having greater Welsh Government involvement in broadcasting. There is a potential problem of too much state involvement in the media.