Wales, land of my fathers

Idon’t want to over-glamorise myself, but I need to explain that I was once nominated for that singular honour, a Welsh BAFTA. (And, before anybody starts, I am very much aware that it should really be a WAFTA. Not a Welsh British Film and Television Award. Ridiculous. And, certainly, never a TAFTA.)

But the point is that I was called upon to brave the Cardiff Media Circus. I hate red carpets. I am the celeb they lower the cameras for.

All five members of the Welsh fourth estate outside the handsome Millennium

Centre completely ignored me, until – as is often the case – I had already got one foot in the foyer.

At that point a hearty, traditional Welsh greeting rang out. ‘Oy!’

I turned.

‘Oy, Griff. We had better have a few words.’

It was the walk of shame. I had to retrace my red-carpet footsteps, to be interviewed by BBC Wales. And, as is often the way, come one, come all. Every media rep wanted a go-see. This was in case I died in the night and the editor asked why Buzz had a picture and they didn’t.

Finally, I faced S4C – the Welshlanguage channel.

‘So, Griff…’ their interviewer began. ‘How does it feel being up against a Welsh presenter tonight, then?’

I gave a clucking laugh. The one that says, yup, I am game for this sort of banter, you nob-head.

‘Let me tell you,’ I swaggered, ‘there is not a drop of English blood in this body…’ (I borrowed that one from Sir Simon Jenkins – that other bogus Welshman.) ‘My full name is Griffith Rhys Llewellyn Gwyneth Kinnock Jones, you see. Born not one hundred yards from where we are standing now… This is the land of my aunties…’

I was about to extend this Welsh badinage, when the presenter held up a hand. ‘Just a minute,’ he said. ‘Can we start this again?’

His cameraman fiddled with some buttons.

‘Righto. Griff … what does it feel like to be up against a proper Welsh presenter?’ Damn. I am not proper Welsh, you see. Though I do say ‘you see’, you see. Even Huw Edwards, who won the bloody thing that night, is more proper than what I am.

A commissioner for BBC Wales once told me, with significantly narrowed eyes, that I was ‘insufficiently Welsh’. It’s galling. I don’t pass.

I can’t speak Welsh. Germaine Greer took the trouble to explain why the ‘language of heaven’ is complicated for the middle-aged slacker like me – the lack of enough alphabet in a Bible-printer’s tray, its affinity with High German and not enough Welsh restaurants in London (unlike those handy teach-yourselfbasic-Italian trattorias).

When I first crossed the border with my wife, Jo, I explained the languageduality obsession. ‘Ambwlans,’ I explained, ‘on the front of emergency service vehicles, for example. That’s easy, but look out for araf, on the road, meaning “slow”. It’s everywhere.’ As we came to the bridge I pointed at the gantry. ‘Manneth,’ I said, using my woeful Welsh pronunciation. ‘What the hell does that mean?’

‘I think it means “manned”, she replied. ‘It’s English for “person in the pay booth”.’

I am one of the Epping Welsh. There were five of us and we all lived in the same house. I persuaded my mother and father to leave Cardiff when I was six months old. My uncle and a legion of aunties stayed to hold the fort.

We went to visit, of course. It was the eight-year-old’s ordeal. We were greeted by a cloud of talcum powder as we crossed the old Severn Bridge. My cute, chubby face was folded into a series of scented blancmanges in Pen-y-Lan and Radyr. The aunties of South Wales leant down to smother the unbearably cute little smart-arse that I was.

Gwen, Megan, Betty. ‘Eucch.’

‘Oh, Griffith bach!’

Was this the only Welsh my father knew? The only use of my full first name, too.

I was called after an ancestral miner in the female line. There were tons of miners on Mummy’s side. Her father, for example, was in the pit. Out of the pit. Back in the pit in a depression. In Ferndale. Proper Rhondda Valley coalfield origins (‘See, S4C!’)

This gave bragging rights at the Marxist student gatherings of Cambridge but cut no ice with Dara Ó Briain. ‘You posh English…’ he would begin his tirades.

‘Dara, I’m a bloody bog-dwelling Celt like you!’

But I knew secretly that my father’s brother Ieuan (think of the ‘u’ as double ‘i’) wore plus fours and used the Wodehousian ‘what?’ at the end of sentences – in normal speech. As in ‘You don’t want to make fun of us Welsh, what?’

‘What? Us … what?’

‘It doesn’t go down well at the golf club.’

Some crude cracks in Not the Nine O’Clock News about the mother country rankled in Radyr. ‘Come home to a real fire: buy a cottage in Wales’ – that sort of thing.

Da was Glamorgan posh. (Impeccable lay-preacher-in-chapel poshness, though.) But in his mid-century midWales everybody wanted to be middle class, which is why Dylan himself got elocution lessons in Swansea and ended up talking as if he had swallowed a canteen of silver cutlery.

For much of my working life, the furthest west I travelled was White City. But later, I was asked to go around pointing at things for the BBC.

Programmes like The Bookworm and Restoration had a ‘remit’. Being worthy, they had to be worthy all over the United Kingdom. No conquered peoples of Great Britain could be left out.

I was sent off into wild, western Wales, to find that half the mountainsides had been blasted away by slate mining. I went into the impeccable Conwy Valley. I went panning for gold, climbing Tryfan and bog-snorkelling in mid Wales. I visited the Gower Peninsula.

I voluntarily plunged into a frozen Snowdonian lake, and – let me just pause for a moment here – I discovered that Wales is the most beautiful country in Britain. I loved it.

‘Oh, not that bloody old thing.’ An interviewer from the Western Mail was unimpressed.

‘Yeah. That tired old thing. Beauty.’

Of course, I understand all that stuff about Welsh struggle and why proper Welsh people think all English people are essentially as creepy and rapacious as

David Cameron – yet another AngloWelshman, in fact, the grandson of Nance Llewellyn.

I made the mistake of suggesting to my dear cameraman mate, Tudor Evans, that Wales was ‘united’ with England.

‘We are a subject race, Griff!’

‘Right you are.’ But not being properly educated in Wales I was never brought up to think of something that happened 700 years ago and was perpetrated largely by French-speaking Normans as being urgently Anglo-oppressive.

I do understand it. I was invited to mangle a Welsh accent in Mine All Mine by Russell Davies and everybody else on the production was proper and very Welsh. They were sweet to me.

We stood on the steps of Swansea Town Hall between takes, eating Joe’s ice cream, and one of the other actors leaned in. ‘It must have been terrible for you…’

‘What?’

‘Being brought up in London,’ he said, feelingly. ‘You must have experienced a lot of racial prejudice.’

I looked vacant. ‘Er… no. Not really. No. You know nobody really noticed that I was Welsh.’

He grimaced. ‘That’s exactly what I mean,’ he said, sympathetically. ‘Those English just don’t care that we are Welsh.’

I am sorry to report that English audiences laugh at that story, but in Neath a man came up and commiserated – he had been moved by my plight.

When I was a boy, we Rhys Joneses were proud to be Welsh. We couldn’t wear funny clothes on special days like fifth-generation ex-pat kilt-wearing Scottish dentists in Saskatchewan, but I can guarantee that if Shirley Bassey came on the telly, we sat in awe of her golden lungs until my mother finally said, as she always did, in respectful tones, ‘She’s Welsh, you know.’

You can’t better that form of indoctrination.

So, despite being humiliated in turn by the University of Wales, S4C and BBC Wales, I spend a lot of time in Cymraeg now. I got all rootsy in South West Wales and bought a farm in Pembrokeshire. This was my homeland, after all.

Who Do You Think You Are? then helpfully uncovered that I actually come from North Wales.

Ah, well. Mind you, you don’t get much more proper than Penmachno. If you doubt me, look it up.

Griff Rhys Jones has won two Welsh BAFTAs