How S4C killed the Welsh broadcasting industry

The Welsh broadcasting industry is a pale shadow of its once glorious self. Some would say it is dying on its knees. Why is this so?

From the 1960s to the mid-1980s the industry was flourishing. It employed thousands of skilled people. So what happened in the 1980s to start the rot? The question has to be asked – has S4C killed the Welsh broadcasting industry?

© Tammra McCauley

Let’s go back to the launch party of Harlech Television in the 1960s. Aside from Lord Harlech, look at the list of Harlech founders and contributors – Richard Burton, Stanley Baker, Geraint Evans, Harry Secombe.

Here were some of the finest creative talent in the world coming together to help create a national broadcaster, not in London or New York, but in Wales – (oh, and the West Country as well). These were talented men with a creative vision. True, they were businessmen also. But they cared passionately about Wales, the Welsh people and our place in the world.

And what did Harlech Television give us? Over 20 years of fantastic, quality broadcasting. Dramas, serials and other shows that were watched not by just a few hundred here in Wales but by millions across the UK … and by tens of millions around the world.

Harlech was not alone in Wales. We had two quality broadcasters. On the other side of Pontcanna Field there were the equally talented staff of BBC Wales.

Cardiff became a flourishing centre of broadcasting excellence. Up until the early 1990s Cardiff was second only to London in the UK for the size of its broadcasting industry. Behind camera some of the best broadcasting engineers in the world worked. Production, camera and sound techniques invented or perfected by Welsh engineers in Cardiff often became mainstream within the industry.

Thousands of highly skilled, highly paid television production people lived and worked here in Wales. The broadcasting industry was a real net income earner for Wales.

Then S4C came along. There was a need, and still is a need, for a Welsh language broadcasting channel in some form.

But the big bags of public money thrown at S4C in the 1980s, and ever since, altered the broadcasting playing-field in Wales. In the 1990s you could be forgiven for thinking that a law had been passed that virtually all programmes made by BBC Wales and Harlech Television, by now HTV Wales, had to be made for S4C.

The spending power of S4C increasingly determined that S4C called the shots and programmes began to be made simultaneously in Welsh and in English – the so-called ‘back-to-back’ productions, that were broadcast on S4C in Welsh and in English on either BBC Wales or HTV Wales.

Economically, this seemed sensible at first.

But then the programmes started to become more insular and inward looking. They often no longer had an audience in other parts of the UK. In time, there were many in Wales no longer interested in watching. Along the South Wales coast and the Welsh Marches aerials were increasingly being turned away from Welsh transmitters.

Not only that, but the English-speaking Welsh members of TV production crews suddenly found work drying up. The more back-to-back productions were made, the more people began to find, if they did not speak Welsh, that work was difficult to get. People’s careers, their livelihoods, were under threat. Many began to relocate across the bridge to safeguard their careers. Skills and talent were lost as a result.

Soon HTV Wales was scrambling around for millions just to hold on to its franchise licence. Redundancies were made, and the thousands who worked in broadcasting slowly became hundreds.

The halcyon days of English-language broadcasting in Wales were over.

Where some Welsh-made programmes had once openly boasted of having millions of viewers, now the audience figures were kept a closely guarded secret. The figures were often so low for Welsh language programmes that the joke was that it would be cheaper to send a video tape to each viewer than to go to the expense of broadcasting. But the joke is no longer funny.

© guano

Nearly £3 billion of public money in real terms has been spent on S4C in its lifetime. Where has all the money gone? What has Wales had in return? What is there to show for it? The tax-payers of Wales, and of the UK, deserve some answers.

BBC Wales is currently benefiting in part from a national plan to move broadcasting out from London to the regions. Where would BBC Wales be today if this were not the case?

Over at ITV Wales the once mighty ‘Harlech’ now produces so little programming that you sometimes wonder if it still exists.

The Welsh broadcasting industry is on its knees. It is dying. It is dying despite nearly £3 billion of public money being handed to S4C.

Did S4C’s economic dominance dictate the programmes that got made in Wales over past 30 years? Were those programmes a turn-off to the majority of people in Wales and of no interest anywhere else in the UK? Did the growth of back-to-back bilingual productions force some English-speaking Welsh programme makers to take their skills out of the industry or out of Wales altogether? Has Wales lost out economically as a result?

Is this how Wales gone from being the second largest broadcasting industry in the UK to where we are today?

The memories of that Harlech Television launch party in 1968 are but a distant memory now. The men who gave us Harlech Television had talent and passion but most of all they had a vision. Broadcasting is about communicating to the widest audience possible. It is also about giving the public what they want, not what you want to force on them. Burton and Co knew that. That is the potential they gave us – and it has been squandered.