Контрольная «The guardian, vanessa thorpe arts and media correspondent»,
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The Guardian, Vanessa Thorpe Arts and media correspondent Sat 1 Apr 2023 15.00 BST Forty years after marches and a hunger strike threat led to a dedicated Cymraeg channel, the launch of a Cardiff crime caper shows drama from Wales has come into its own. News coverage of Wales in the 1980s often pictured dogged defenders of the Welsh language carrying placards demanding the television channel they had once been promised. Some of these protesters tore down English road signs, a few even planted firebombs; several went to prison. This spring, as the legacy of that campaign for greater representation on television passes some significant milestones, these angry slogans read like relics of a half-forgotten war. Now, not only is Netflix about to screen its first drama made in the Welsh language, but the tempestuous story behind the birth of S4C (Sianel Pedwar Cymru), the dedicated Welsh-speaking channel, is being marked, 40 years on, in a provocative new film. «There is a real moment now for Welsh-language storytelling», said Llinos Griffin-Williams, S4C’s chief content officer. «I don’t think we have been loud enough about it until now. We have so much happening». The recent public thirst for screen drama made in Welsh has a lot to do with the trail blazed by Nordic and Korean foreign-language shows on Netflix and BBC Four, Griffin-Williams admits, but she argues it also stems from a growing Welsh confidence in its own talent pool. The crime caper series Dal y Mellt, which will have the title Rough Cut when it runs on Netflix from next Monday, is the international streamer’s first drama told in Welsh, or Cymraeg, and it follows a gang of misfits as they plan a diamond heist on a ferry. Set partly on the backstreets of Cardiff and partly on a lonely farm near Porthmadog, it is a show that revels in the scale and variety of the Welsh landscape, as much as it has fun with an amusing script. Adapted for the screen by Iwan «Iwcs» Roberts from his own novel, the Vox Pictures production has already enjoyed critical success on S4C’s on-demand service Clic, and on BBC iPlayer. «It paints a real picture of Wales for viewers and we’re pleased that, although there is tension, there’s no drugs, no sex and not much violence», said Ll?r Morus, who co-produced Rough Cut. Morus is also proud of the range of quality actors now working in Welsh, quite aside from the recent group of Welsh stars to make it in Hollywood, such as Taron Egerton and Matthew Rhys. «Many of the faces in our series are well known inside Wales from Welsh-language shows. People like Siw Hughes, who is in the long-running BBC soap Pobol y Cwm, and it is great they will have a wider audience now». In Rough Cut, Hughes plays the accomplished con artist and wannabe gang member Meri-J?n, to great comic effect. One actor in the cast already familiar to audiences of English-speaking drama is Mark Lewis Jones, who appeared in The Crown as Edward Millward, the man who taught Charles, then Prince of Wales, the language. His scenes in that popular show, he said, did a lot to raise awareness of Welsh as a living tongue: «It did an enormous amount of good. And now it’s great that Dal y Mellt, which is so brilliant, will also be seen around the world», he said. In the series Lewis Jones is cast as a gangland figure, emotionally troubled by his military past, but he stars in a very different role in the one-off film that was commissioned to mark the 40th anniversary of S4C. Called Y S?n, it follows the political side of the campaign for the new TV channel and Lewis Jones plays Willie Whitelaw, Margaret Thatcher’s trusted home secretary, appearing complete with the politician’s trademark bushy eyebrows. «What I love about these two shows, the series and the film, Y S?n, is that they sit comfortably in the Welsh language and there isn’t an English-only version», said Lewis Jones, referring to the recent practice of filming first in one language and then the other, a process used for other popular Welsh shows, such as Keeping Faith. «I don’t treat the Welsh language work as some sort of passion project, they are as important to me as the English shows», he added. (https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2023/apr/01/this-is-a-real-moment-netflix-series-cements-rise-of-welsh-language-drama)