Self-praise, my mother always told me, is no honour. The sound of someone blowing his or her own trumpet should naturally incline us to ask what’s being hidden behind the brassy top notes.
So, whenever a minister begins an interview with, “Well John, this is a good news story,” our automatic instinct should be to shout back “we’ll be the judge of that”. Reading a publisher’s blurb that declares some new work “a ground-breaking achievement from the acknowledged master of horror” should prompt us to wait awhile until we can read some genuine reviews of what is undoubtedly a turkey for which there will be no Thanksgiving. And hearing anyone describe him or herself by saying “I’m mad, me,” or “I just get high on life” or “I’m a people person” should automatically alert us to the looming presence of a crashing bore.
That’s why it is understandable that the establishment a few years ago of a networking organisation calling itself “Social, Welsh and Sexy” should have provoked instant scepticism and near-automatic derision. Behind the audacity of the name you could hear the agonised grunt of people trying just a little too hard to lever themselves into stylishness, like an opera diva trying to shoehorn herself into Kate Moss’s jeans in an effort to achieve full party-girl status.
But the sceptics are having to reconsider. The derision is muted, even dying. For the sexiness of Wales, an idea that I acknowledge has taken some getting used to, is becoming almost an orthodoxy. The founders of Social, Welsh and Sexy were not, it appears, dreamers projecting on to their nation qualities that didn’t quite fit but visionaries whose time has, at last, come.
The moment when Wales’s move from overlooked Celtic cousin to underwired erotic coquette was confirmed arrived last Sunday night as BBC Three recorded the highest ratings on digital TV for anything other than live sport.
The show that inspired the spike in viewing figures was Torchwood, the sci-fi spin-off from Doctor Who, created by Russell T. Davies and starring the Tom Cruise lookalike John Barrowman as Captain Jack Harkness. Torchwood has a number of things going for it, from sly wit to rather reassuringly expensive camera work, but perhaps the most striking aspect of the whole production is its setting — in Cardiff.
The decision to make Cardiff the prime location for battles of rare passion with strange forces from alien cultures may have been inspired by the city’s experience of hosting the FA Cup Final. But it is inspired nevertheless.
I may be biased, as someone married to a girl who was born in Wales, but I think that the romantic and sensual qualities we normally associate with the Mediterranean are more apparent in South Wales than in any other part of Britain. The heroine of Torchwood, Eve Myles, who plays PC Gwen Cooper, is a Celtic Rossellini. Cardiff’s most famous female export, Charlotte Church, for all her love of rugby and lager, is a more identifiably southern than northern European archetype. From her Lollobrigida voluptuousness to her Callas-style personal dramas, she is a classic Mediterranean starlet.
The second episode of Torchwood makes satirical, and at times rather crude, fun of Cardiff’s reputation as a party town and South Walians may bristle slightly at the depiction of their city as too social, and sexy, for its own good. But there is an undeniable strain of loucheness in the South Wales air, and one that I think is even more pronounced if one goes a little farther west, to the city that even more than Cardiff is Britain’s most Mediterranean — Swansea.
I’m well aware of the general view that Swansea is a war-damaged, industry-scarred city surrounded by bleakness. But I think it has one of the most beautiful settings of any British settlement, with a sense of space and sweep that other, much more cramped, towns would benefit from enjoying.
Nestling on a curve of coastline and stretching out to embrace the communities of Mumbles and Caswell Bay, greater Swansea is Britain’s Bay of Naples.
“Sprawl” is usually taken, in the context of urban development, to be a bad thing. But thought of in the light of Swansea’s languorous reach along its coastline it can better be appreciated as the relaxed use of space, lending a less cramped feel to modern living.
The sense that Swansea has a more relaxed and enjoyable tempo to its days than some other parts of Britain has been captured in the literature of natives such as Dylan Thomas and migrants who have enjoyed palmy years there, such as Kingsley Amis.
Wales has sometimes been the neglected elder daughter of the UK family, elbowed out of the picture by a more assertive Scotland and a more troubled Ulster. But now, I hope, she is coming into her own, appreciated for a beauty too long overlooked.
First and worst
I read with mounting fear, then a rush of relief, The Times’s guide to Britain’s worst TV shows yesterday. For amid all the references to Mind Your Language and The White Heather Club I was braced for a reminder of the worst programme to air on Channel 4. Mainly because I was one of its presenters.
Stab in the Dark, which was broadcast, initially live, in the summer of 1992, was supposed to be a contemporary That Was the Week That Was. But it was a disaster on an epic scale, a televisual Gallipoli into which men and resources were poured only for the world to avert its eyes in horror.
An attempt to combine instant stand-up commentary on the news with subversive filmed reports in which the presenters pointed up the absurdity of closed worlds, and live interviews in which politicians’ thirst for exposure was used to underline the superficiality of their positions, descended into a terrible, terrible mess.
And yet, and yet. The show’s interviews, in due course, spawned the style made famous on The Eleven o’Clock Show by Sacha Baron Cohen’s Ali G. The faux-naïf reports, fronted by David Baddiel, also inspired imitators. And packaged instant comic commentary on the news lies behind the success of shows such as Mock The Week and 8 out of 10 Cats.
So 13 years after what was widely seen by the commentators as a disaster, the enterprise may well have had a lasting, unacknowledged and beneficial effect. I wonder if that might apply to anything else?
Diary cream
Thanks for your kind suggestions on memoirs that actually enhance the reputations of the politicians who wrote them. I’m working through the titles and will report back on the best hidden gem that you have helped me to uncover.
Michael Gove is Conservative MP for Surrey Heath
