WALES TODAY OR YESTERDAY?

FROM the tear-threatened immediate reaction by black-tied Huw Edwards onwards, the BBC’s response to the death of HM The Queen was a direct contradiction of the modern values deeply embedded in youth-led aggressive multiculturalism, gender identity reforming protest and meaningful devolved/republican political reform they are now supposed to actively represent and promote.
It left me feeling certain that nothing much has really changed (apart, perhaps, from the fact that then we had little choice about paying the licence fee as there was no alternative) since the Prince of Wales’s Investiture in 1969 at Caernarfon Castle when I watched as an eight-year-old as spies and cops wandered around watching and warning us.
White might in the form of guns, swords and sabres linked to masculine military ranking – so powerfully embodied by the dead men walking Andrew and Harry ordered NOT to wear their uniforms so they appeared curiously “docked” like naughty overfamiliar poodles – still rules in the UK.
In Wales, particularly, it felt as if the future is too locked into the past for change.
Brian Hoey, the veteran BBC Wales royal commentator, broadcasting on the day King Charles visited Llandaff Cathedral, seemed to typify it….a kind of unquestionable and totally unconditional requirement on us all to bow down to that might, or else.
Hoey went on air in September 1962 as the first presenter on Wales Today and suitably stands as a still living, breathing motif for the past using that much more quaint and formal language to defer and refer to often bizarre court and Church in Wales protocol, etiquette and conventions out of time and vividly jarring with multi-race, multi-gender Wales today.
Younger reporters having to stand next to him apologised profusely, at points losing their dignity, when they called Charles “Prince”, as if they had slighted him personally, and quickly called Camilla “Queen” when she is, actually, “Queen Consort” (a very, very important distinction we would all do well to remember).
The general tone and feel was of blind gratitude and obedience, just as it was in 1969 when an assortment of nutty sickly sweet soft and hard centres like Emlyn Williams were wheeled out to stand in the castle grounds and sound like posh Welsh people to camera, celebrating and hailing the ghastly convention with its madcap madness perhaps best exemplified in that florid and camp Japanese-looking outfit worn by the colourful Lord Snowdon.
And the political leaders made no effort to disguise their dependence, either, feeling bold enough only to hope that William, too hastily made new Prince of Wales, might show an interest in learning the Welsh language (get him to move here and he will have to because everything now comes in Welsh first whether we like it or not).
I felt a shiver up my back on hearing that King Charles was given an intimate Cardiff Bay “audience” with Mark Drakeford, and saw it as the shape of things to come, sadly.
Dr Doom is a leader who gave us “interventionist” minister Alun Davies, who thought that giving media company Newsquest more money to save jobs was a good idea (yeah, great idea, that).
https://medium.com/@C4CJ/newsquest-funding-is-shocking-but-not-surprising-535735b98242
Ultimately, he who pays the piper calls the tune and the BBC has always known who really pays.
And so too, of course, has regional government.

And in English media, the drift towards partisanship and/or partiality goes on with people like Reform UK’s Richard Tice now presenting “news” then commenting on it after.

He remarked on how wonderful it was to see some “bobbies on the beat” at the time of the funeral as if he was watching Mary Poppins.

They weren’t on the beat, you idiot, those cops were primed like wound springs to pounce on terrorists while protecting world leaders at tremendous expense.

Indeed, there was the usual lemming-like mad rush among the ego-driven glitterati to see and be seen, perhaps best exemplified by Phil and Holly jumping the queue to discreetly “pay their respects”.

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