Griff Rhys Jones - Insufficiently Welsh

INTRODUCTION

Over the years I have learned to swallow the toad. Its not a Welsh expression. Nice if it was. I got it from Sicily, via Norman Lewis, the master travel writer (Welsh himself, actually, now I come to think of it).

Was Lewis perhaps a little prone to embroidery? Is that perhaps a Welsh romantic trait? I am getting ahead of myself. I cant start off with wild racial generalisations; theres plenty of time for that later. I just like the phrase. It has resonance.

For my part, the toads I have gulped down, straight-faced, include the rejection of virtually every programme idea I have ever proposed to television executives since 1990. I have ingested Catanian swamps of wart-ridden amphibious reptiles, in brown offices in ugly buildings. But this one lingers. It was my Monkey Tennis. Ten years ago, I went to a BBC Wales commissioner and proposed a televisual entertainment featuring a well-known British television star. I thought this celebrity would add some lustre to BBC Waless output and I could get him cheap.

There was a sickly pause. I detected what might best be described as a shudder. No he opined, with a wonderful Welsh open-vowelled negative. He was about to present a toad for my delectation, I could tell. Not him. No. I am afraid he would be insufficiently Welsh.

My face was a standing stone. It was useless to point out that my presenter was funny, beloved, celebrated and starry and a personal friend of mine as well. Pointless to enquire whether Welsh television viewers might enjoy a less parochial presenter. Silly to point out that Wales can cope with outsiders, just as the English embrace Terry Wogan, Gavin Esler and er Huw Edwards.

I swallowed manfully. Yes, of course, I said.

Something dark flopped into my belly.

I realised, however, as I stared into the glassy eye of my interlocutor, that there was a subtext to our conversation. You see, it was not really my proposal that was insufficiently Welsh, or my mate. It was something else. The commissioner was gazing steadily at Griffith Rhys Jones, son of Elwyn and Gwynneth, scion of Megan and Ieuan and Evan, spawn of Betws-y-Coed, Penmachno and the Rhondda, Cardiff-born, dark of hair, thick-thighed and round-faced. And I suspected that he thought that it was me who was insufficiently Welsh.

Having been brought up in London (founded by a Welshman, according to legend), one of the Essex Boyos, a white-wellington booted Dragon at the end of the Central line and having missed the cultural communal Celtic after-game warm bath of Cymric fellow-feeling, who did I think I was, returning to Cardiff and pretending to have connections?

So, am I insufficiently Welsh? Its time to find out. That is what this book is all about. I am going out on the road to search for my Celtic roots and explore the land of my aunties. Language, the landscape, rugby, dogs, legends, botany, wildlife, furniture and a few more bits on the side: I looked into them all and here are the results.

***

Just to book-end here, though: a little while later I had another suggestion for BBC Wales. This time they were looking for a satirical show. I have made a few anarchic sallies in the past. A prominent politician had become annoyed with the election results in the principality and vented his frustration in public. We suggested a hard-hitting riposte called The Fucking Welsh.

We didnt even get asked to an interview on that one.

A BIT OF BACKGROUND

My father used the telephone as if announcing a concert party on a pre-war radio. If he could ever be persuaded to answer the thing, and then only in the absence of my mother, whose delegated task this normally was, he lifted the heavy, black, Bakelite lump from its cradle in the hallway, straightened his back and addressed the caller as if from the other side of a canyon. Hellooo? He would declare. Who am I speaking with?

His usual faux home-counties tones would swoop into a musical lilt. (And he was no musician.) There was immediately a pronounced fruitiness to his vocal chords. We were back in the Valleys. My father became Welsh on the telephone, God bless him.

The Valleys? Ah, but here I show my own ignorance. We were Welsh alright. My mother came from Ferndale, in the Rhondda which is, I believe, a proper valley. My father emerged from a gloomy red house in the suburbs of Cardiff. (This was more of a slight hill than a valley.) Every single relative I have seems to have been vehemently Welsh, but I do not mean that they came from the Valleys. I am making wild, clichd outsider generalities already.

Elwyns was the posh voice of the Cardiff suburbs, of the lawyers and physicians of the great coal port. Their inclination was to be Saxon in their manners. I was born in Cardiff but we moved away when I was six months old. I left a legion of aunties and great aunties, grannies and nans encamped across the lower west from Tonypandy to Pontypridd. It gave us our identity, in English Epping. We had to watch the rugby. I was dragooned into the choir. Sometimes we went to Dagenham to visit fellow Welsh exile doctors, who smoked and cackled a lot and had an easy, soppy familiarity that I came to associate with proper comfortable Welshness.

My granny and grandpa moved to join us. He had been a miner and wore a cloth cap and swore impressively in pidgin Welsh, as he levered his wheezing and arthritic body into the Morris Traveller. (Duw, duw, oh fucky! - Grandpa!! The children!!) Granny wrote letters in Welsh to Aunty Betty. There were Megans and Ieuans, Wyns, Gwens, Gwynneths, Gwyns and Evanses all over the Christmas card list.

You must have experienced a lot of racial prejudice, growing up in Epping. One Welsh actor had taken me aside, when we worked together on Russell T Daviess Mine all Mine for ITV drama.

I wondered what he was on about. No, not really, I started carefully. Nobody ever really noticed I was Welsh.

He nodded sagely. Thats exactly what I mean. He looked sorrowful. They dont care about the Welsh, you see the English.

In all honesty, nobody did care that I was Welsh. I am not really included in Wales by the Welsh. How could I be, with my weird part Essex tough junior school, part posh Sussex kindergarten accent? Mavis Nicholson once disparaged me to my face for speaking with a pretentious voice. (Oh, for your common touch, Mavis, love.)

I often went to Wales when I was tiny, by the long one-way system that went through every traffic light in Britain. In Cardiff we stayed with the forbidding Nain (North Walian Welsh for Nan). She was a tall woman with a shock of long, long white hair, tied up in a bun, attended throughout her life by my spinster Auntie Megan, who had big teeth and spaniel eyes. They had no idea when we might arrive, so they never cooked. Wales meant imprisonment for hours in that Morris Traveller and then salad: ham and hard-boiled eggs, and I hated salad. Cardiff meant the arcades (Whats so good about them, Granny?). It meant walking with excruciatingly slow ancient people. It meant loud ticking clocks in dark drawing rooms, and being on my best behaviour.

As I grew older, I kept away. The relatives all died. I went to visit my elderly uncle, who dressed like Edward VIII, spent a great deal of time in the South of France and was the only person I ever met who said what? at the end of sentences, like a character in a Wodehouse story. (Splendid day, what?) But even he once sat me down in his pink wallpapered modern house near Radyr golf course and gently upbraided me. You dont want to make fun of Wales in those sketches of yours, what?