Insufficiently Welsh by Griff Rhys Jones Page A

Welsh comedy drama. Alas, it merely bounced along the landing strip, but, luckily, along came “Gavin and Stacey” and that soared into the stratosphere. Wales became cool, but not with us.
    I take the blame. There was one long speech on the top of a hill in the first episode where my Welsh accent set off on a worldwide expedition, visiting Mumbai and Northern Ireland before coming to rest in Windsor Davies – “insufficiently Welsh”, I fear.
    During the making of that series I lived in a cottage on the Gower. I vividly remember my five o’clock starts to get to make-up in the Mumbles, driving off, with the light creeping over the hills, to weave past wild horses and through herds of half-awake sheep. There is a type of horse unique to this area called a ‘Gower pony’. It is said there are hundreds of them on the Gower common lands. Through centuries of living and breeding on rough grazing, they have become happy to eat tough plants such as brambles and gorse. And too tough to get out of the way of cars.
    â€“ RHOSSILI –
    The far end of the Gower peninsula terminates in a claw of headland with two rocky outcrops at either end of it and a huge, sweeping, knock-you-dead beach in-between. It is a favourite for sunset photographs. Somebody has worked out that Rhossili is the seventh most photographed sunset beach in the world (a jigsaw manufacturer perhaps?). You may remember it from the Opening Ceremony of the London 2012 Olympic Games when a youth choir sang “Bread of Heaven” from there and it was broadcast at the Olympic stadium. Or not.
    I went out for a morning run, on a stretch of perfect sand, littered with razor shells, soft worn wood and the very occasional bit of faded polyester rope. At the back of the shore is a small crumbling earth cliff and, between the top of that and the beginning of the hill, sits a single, white-painted cottage and its stone outbuildings. It was once a rectory and was plonked down between two parishes, so that the vicar had an equal distance to walk to his Sunday businesses. Today it is available to rent from the National Trust and is possibly the most desirable British holiday cottage on earth.
    I kept looking up at it as I bounced along. Already there were dog-walkers, toddlers and earnest beachcombers dotted about on the sand, and then two blokes passing a rugby ball ran on either side of me. As they did so, they passed their ball into my hands and I discovered my “challenge” inexpertly taped to it. Apparently, I was to find and cook “a feast for a rugby hero”.
    Surely, you ask, that wasn’t a real surprise, was it? That was a set-up. You knew that that ball was coming your way. And, since you ask – of course I did. It was a contrivance. I was out, running about on this ideal beach on an ideal June morning in the name of television artifice, and if it hadn’t been for the pressing needs of the cosy travelogue I would have happily run about on it for the rest of the day. Instead, I went back up to the rectory and while I was waiting for the crew to catch up I poked my nose inside. There were two ladies with pinnies in the kitchen.
    â€œHello,” I said, “ We’re from the telly. I expect they’ve told you we were coming.”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œOh. OK.”
    â€œBut come on in. We’re just cleaning up for the next guests.”
    I didn’t like to. I knew that if we filmed inside we might have to pay the National Trust. But I wasn’t filming, just nosing around.
    Tudor, our cameraman, whose early life seems to have been spent entirely on the very beach I had just left (or so I gathered from the amount of reminiscing he did) had recently rented these plain rooms, with the cream-painted walls and chintz curtains, to celebrate his fiftieth birthday. It was his present to himself. He had gazed on this house while building sandcastles as a kid, then while chilling around a fire