What with the recession, the Millennium and that, I've been thinking of branching out into other careers, preferably those of other people.
Two fields that attract me are politics and Evil, so it makes sense that I should consider spin-doctoring.
Being a Welsh, the sole choice for me is to offer my services to Plaid Cymru, which nowadays helpfully subtitles itself The Party of Wales.
There's a Westminster election only a matter of months away, and Plaid needs to raise its media game if it's to consign Labour to the working men's club of history.
And so here's my shooting script for a short party political broadcast on behalf of Plaid. If anyone from Tŷ Gwynfor is reading, feel free to use it. In return I ask only to be made head of ADEC (Adran Diogelwch Cenedlaethol - Department of National Security) come the glorious day.
SCENE: A drizzly valley town, dragons foraging on the slag heaps and facing down feral sheep over moody, male-voice hymnal music. Camera pans along a black and white terraced street to a doorway where a TANGNEFEDDWR ["peacemaker" - cruel but fair Welsh policeman of the Nationalist Future] is clubbing a Labour canvasser who looks vaguely Kinnockian.
KINNOCKITE: [under truncheon crunches] Urgh, arghl, bloody kebabbed mun, totally and utterly...
TANGNEFEDDWR: 'ckin' Sachsengruss, innit!
SCENE: Camera fades into sepia and pans in through window of house opposite as hymn music lightens a little. A pious Welsh family of Father, Mam, teenage son and eight-year-old daughter are settling down to an evening meal of oven-ready chips at an oilcloth dinner table.
Portraits of Saunders Lewis, Cayo Evans and Shaky adorn the dingy walls.
FATHER: Before we eats, let us never forget or forgive the Battle of Morfa Rhuddlan, the Treason of the Blue Books, Hedd Wyn, Wales not qualifying for the World Cup in 1974, and Windsor Davies.
MAM: Ap-men!
Family tucks into chips, content in their Cambritude.
Then the little girl looks through the window to the scene of the Tangnefeddwr wearily clubbing the yappy Labour lackey.
Slowly, she gets up from the table and heads for the front door.
Family stops eating aghast, and music halts abruptly. Father moves to intercept the girl, but Mam holds him back. They watch petrified as their daughter steps out onto the slick pavement, and crosses the street towards the scene of the walloping.
She extends the slate of chips towards the two men.
The Tangnefeddwr turns, his truncheon raised ready to rain down bludgeoning blows, his face a scree of stubble under a Pinochet ski-slope peaked cap.
The little girl looks him in the eye, and offers him a chip.
The Tangnefeddwr, tears mingling with the sleet in his slate-grey eyes, takes the tiny chip in his great, gauntleted hand, and nibbles it with the delicacy of a Hawarden vicar's wife.
He strokes the little girl's damp hair in thanks, then notices the muttering colonial heap bolshily bleeding on his boots below.
A gradual grin cracks the craggy terrain of his endlessly Welsh face, and he hands the little girl his truncheon.
With a coy smile, she sets about the Kinnockite's sweetbreads under the sheltering gaze of the chip-munching Tangnefeddwr.
VOICEOVER: [Philip Madoc, ideally] Gymry, dewch i rhannu (Welshies, come and share)!
Calon by Injaroc (or Diffiniad, if you must), plays out over fade to Plaid Cymru logo.
END
22 comments:
Syr, you have a fine and individual culture, and every right to beat yourselves up for that reason alone. But is Plaid Cymru really Welsh enough to take on the task??! Leadership should be passed to the Gorsedd y Beirdd themselves! Dylan Thomas (God bless him) as Health Minister, lanky misanthropic streak of miserablist piss R. S. Thomas as minister of everything else*; prime minister is (sorry, truncheon to the knackers now) 1980s Welsh Poet Laureate Siadwell.
*Seriously though, I actually love these guys' work..., Manley Hopkins, David Jones, etc :)
I admire your bravura refusal to accept either death or ficticiousness as a bar to Welsh cabinet membership, Gadjo, and take your point about the bourgeois ameliorationists of Plaid.
I hope, like any good entryist, to win them over to the ways of Maoism through the promise of police brutality and control over the elements.
Then we Cymry Rouges will emerge from the wings and make Wales the first slate-based autarky in Europe.
The key is not to let them know this, so keep it under your hat, eh what?
Sorry, NGB, I got a bit carried away. Your utopian Cambria is based on a more deterministic and clear-eyed vision than mine own (informed, rather pathetically, by the psuedo-Welshes that I put forward...respectively too pissed, too Oxbridge, too fictitious). The slate-based autarky will undoubtedly carry the day what with ever-increasing need for snooker tables.
Worry not about leakage of the Rougist plan: descretion (in that over-polished, sexually-ambiguous kind of a way) is ever the watchword of us Pottist chaps.
Windsor Davies! He had to be genuine Welsh, didn't he? He did a damn good accent, you can't deny that. Almost as good as Michael Bates as an Indian.
At long last you've mentioned the male-voice hymns. What is the correct Pottist position on all this choral stuff? Isn't a lot of the singing in English? I have doubts about the bona fide Welshness of it all.
Gadjo, the sybaritic idling of the English billiarding class will fuel our long march, make no mistake. An ambassadorship to the Isle of Man awaits you - followed by recall and the usual prolonged execution, of course.
GB, glad you raised the matter of male voice choirs. These abominations are spreading around an innocent world like jam on a toddler's trousers - but evil jam.
The otherwise admirable MC Ward is playing his own part in this slobbering Lovecraftian horror, and ought to be ashamed of himself:
http://notesfromtheteflgraveyard.blogspot.com/2007/12/feliz-natal-to-all-my-readers.html
I shall deal with it in a forthcoming treatise on the joys of Welsh music.
Clearly the Cymru Rouge welcome in the hillsides is at odds with the traditions of the Land of Song. Anyway, a Brazilian male voice choir is just an excuse for larking around in harmony.
Regarding your party political broadside, it at once inspires, captivates and unnerves. Much like a Hugo Chavez fireside chat.
Mr Ward is right about the party political broadcast – I couldn’t get those images out of my head all night. One could take it from the big fella – getting mashed to a pulp in the name of The Cause – but the girl's something else. In 10 years time you know she’ll look and sound like Charlotte Church. You know you’ll fall in love with her. Yet she destroys you.
Thanks for the vote of confidence, chaps. Images that haunt and horrify is what politics ought to be about.
MC, I'm glad that you've applied the thesis of Shklovsky and made male-voice choirs strange in a Brazilian way. This alone will spare you an eternity on Bardsey Island with Glenys Bloody Kinnock.
Taking a bad idea and making it useful is what creativity is all about. As I said earlier, Al Gore may have invented the Intern Net, but it took the mercantile genius of the Dutch to fill it with porn.
Charlotte Church, la belle dame sans merci. How right you are, Gadjo.
well exactly :-)
Mr. Bananas' important point about Windsor Davies still hasn't been addressed, however. Was he just too Welsh to be Welsh?? He was born, we understand, in London and only moved to Wales when he was 9. He therefore presumably got his accent by aping (sorry, GB) the accent of his playmates rather than imbibing it, as is traditional, at the hard and pointy tit of a Welsh mother. He has convinced Pottists for decades that a Welsh actually talks this way. (So why has the Cymry Rouge let him live thus far?)
Gadjo, I'm still recovering from the shock of having someone challenge a decision of the Cymru Rouge Angka-p, especially when the challenge takes the form of an accusation of leniency.
To address your and GB's point, Windsor's being born in London is neither here nor there in terms of Welshness. His parents were as Welsh as a couple of sprung-rhythm merchants in miners' hats burning down a 19th century toll booth while dressed as their mams.
Saunders Lewis, top nationalist playwright and Francoist nutjob, was born in Liverpool. David Lloyd George, the Caernarfon corset-burster and Hammer of the Fenians, was born in Manchester.
Whereas both of the Bloody Kinnocks, professional vaterlandlose Reichsfeinde, were born in Wales.
AS for Windsor's accent and style of acting, I refer you to my earlier post on Fychan ap Rhys (Vincent Price) on the cherished gaminess of Welsh thesps.
I do like the idea of being too Welsh to be Welsh. Reminds me of the Vichy French posters of Maréchal Pétain, which said "Are You As French As Him?". Sounds absurd in English, which is why Britain has been so short of dictators. French lends itself to orotund statements, hence various Napoleons, Pétain and De Gaulle.
Discuss.
Okay I may not have understood all the subtle political undertones (I'm English with cousins in Monmouth mind you and I like rugby) but......... I've forgotten what I was going to say. I may come back.
Yes, inductive reasoning, with Saunders Lewis and Glenys B. Kinnock as the exemplifiers, strongly indicates that Jus sanguinis rather than Jus soli* is the prerequisite for Welshness. And your Vincent Price Regression Theory is indeed convincing in its explanation of this phenomenon in the acting profession. Another case in point is Ruth Madoc, Hi-de-Hi star and Silurian Sex-Siren (and very possibly Windsor in drag, given the accent and acting style), who was born in Norfolk!
*I had to look these up. But can German readers please furnish a translation of vaterlandlose Reichsfeinde?
I've left No Good Boyo trying to hang a portrait of himself. This may take longer than did the painting itself.
Congratulations, Mr Birdwatcher, on the true eloquence of your comment. There is a certain profundity in the honestly inarticulate.
Mr Dilo, Boyo was quoting Wilhelm II, his favourite among the Kaisers, who characterised socialists as "enemies of the Empire who lack the Fatherland" .
German, like Welsh, is a chillingly concise language. This befits a people in a hurry. I am aware of the contradiction in relation to the Welsh.
Are there portraits for sale of No Good Boyo?? I’d like to own one - just a little one, something tasteful. Perhaps one of him on a Caernarfon throne, clasping in his gauntleted hand the blood-encrusted Cleddyf y Genedl'.
(I’m taking this all far too seriously, aren’t I.)
Epicures of the Terrible may purchase images of my life companion here, courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery:
http://www.npg.org.uk/live/bp/?p=162
A more accurate rendition was once on display in Wales, but has been deported from the country by an Assembly Measure:
http://www.gwobrportreadaucymru.org.uk/LL/LifeLong.nsf/a88a26f6c4aec20580256a8f003db781/568037ee178e35368025711500582978?OpenDocument
It now hangs in the attic that doubles as No Good Boyo's study and lavabo.
Strewth, Mrs B., he's gorgeous. I could never hang this over the mantelpiece for fear of rekindling in the wife anything other than the acceptance of totalitarian dictatorship that was my intention!
Thanks Gadjo, that's why it was banned in Wales. Perhaps Madame Dilo needs to spend some time on the ideological re-orientation course we Rouges run in a caravan in Mwnt. Run by Minister of War and Fighting Iago Anffawd, it's very popular with single mums, apparently.
So, spin-doctor of cymru evil, and at the risk of provoking the misleadingly named Mrs Boyo, what was wrong with marrying a nice rouge Welsh lass, eh? Not good enough for ye?
Herr Pop, I had little choice in the matter. Mrs Boyo (why misleading? simply because it's not her name and we're not married by any authority recognised by earthly powers?) had a set of clothing left over from her first husband, and decided that I would fit.
The rest is my life.
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