I’ve interviewed Sioned Wiliam a couple of times before. The first time was about twenty years ago, when she was the head of comedy at ITV commissioning the likes of Baddiel and Skinner, Harry Hill, Simon Nye and Rob Brydon, not to mention BAFTA winners like Cold Feet, and also The Sketch Show, the series which first brought Lee Mack and Tim Vine to national recognition. A few years later, when Ian Greaves and myself spent a year – a year! – writing a book on Week Ending, she told us about writers’ meetings and discovering a young Cardiff writer called Peter Baynham. She has become a good friend.
But as well as working as a producer of comedy and entertainment shows in London – Tonight with Jonathan Ross, Game On, Drop the Dead Donkey, Yonderland, Paris starring Alexei Sayle and Big Train (the latter two written by Linehan and Mathews) – and running the Radio 4 comedy department for seven years (2015–22), Sioned has had a considerable parallel career working in Welsh language entertainment broadcasting, as presenter, contributor and behind the scenes.
As someone who has spent over two-thirds of my life living in Wales, I am struck by the irony that my grasp of the Welsh language remains patchy at best, but the divide has always fascinated me. And so, via Zoom, one afternoon in May 2023, we discussed not only Sioned’s career in comedy and commissioning, but a subject that is comparatively rarely written about in English media: pop music in Wales.
But we began with the usual question: what music was Sioned Wiliam listening to at home when she was young?
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SIONED WILIAM
My father [academic and prize-winning writer Urien Wiliam, 1929–2006] loved classical music, so he played a lot of Beethoven and Brahms, although he didn’t like Mozart, he thought he was populist rubbish! He loved Vaughan Williams, but it’s only relatively recently that I’ve grasped what a sublime composer he was. My husband Ian [Brown, top sitcom writer] has also introduced me to composers like Britten, and Handel operas – I remember going to see those brilliant Nick Hytner productions of Xerxes and Ariodante at the ENO. And we also once went to see a concert at Westminster Abbey to mark the 300th anniversary of the death of Queen Mary, with the music of Henry Purcell [televised live on BBC2, 6 March 1995]. It was wonderful to be in that building where the music was originally played, with the drummers entering from the cloisters and remarkable singers like Ian Bostridge and Emma Kirkby.
But back to music at home when I was young. We also had a lot of protest music in the house because my parents were like a lot of people in the 60s in Wales who were involved in the Welsh language movement, which was allied with the civil rights movements all over the world, really. There were a lot of really great protest songs in the Welsh language by young, very groovy bands, all fantastic singers. I’ve still got singles from that era, quite valuable now because they’re quite rare. I’ve even got a song book from that 60s/70s period, which my son has been learning to play.
As children, we used to perform in what they call noson lawen, which means ‘merry night’, which was a tradition, and we were forever doing something from school in a party, or something like singing a song and then finding as I was on the same stage as these Welsh stars like Heather Jones, one of the greatest voices ever, and Dewi Pws, and bands like Y Pelydrau.
At school, we sang oratorios, using this sol-fah technique, which was very popular in the Welsh industrial areas because it was a way for people to access music without having to read music. So our wonderful music teacher Lily Richards taught us Mendelssohn’s Elijah and Verdi’s Requiem using sol-fa, so my copy is all ‘do-ray-me’. You could hear these sounds and she would do all the hand gestures and everything.
As children, you grew up with this incredibly rich culture of music, both popular and beautiful. There was the Eisteddfod tradition, which was competitive, and you did that at a local level, or at the youth level, the Urdd, the many competitions you were part of as a child. And then there was the nationalist element as well. But also there was this upsurge in live music. People like Meic Stephens, Heather Jones, Dewi Pws, Geraint Jarman, Eleri Llwyd… There was a woman called Nest Howells, with the most incredible singing voice, who used to sing for a group called Brân.
Gruff Rhys from Super Furry Animals put together these wonderful compilation albums called Welsh Rare Beat (Finders Keepers Records, two volumes, 2005, 2007) featuring a lot of these singers, the best of 60s/70s Welsh rock. Gruff comes from that tradition of very melodic music. Welsh musicians tend to like hymns and folk songs, very melodic and pretty. They don’t have these repetitive, swirling things that you have in Gaelic music or in Scots music. They tend to have a beginning, a middle and end, quite often in the minor key, but they always have very beautiful melodies. It’s a real tradition.
JUSTIN LEWIS
Funny you mention the Welsh Rare Beat compilations. Volume 2 has a Swansea-based group on it called AD 73, for which my dad sang and played drums! But unfortunately, the title and recording don’t match: the title’s called ‘Higher and Higher’ but it’s actually the other side of the single that’s featured, ‘Jerusalem’, which is an instrumental, and so my dad isn’t singing on it!
SIONED WILIAM
You must let Gruff know!
JUSTIN LEWIS
I should really, shouldn’t I? Actually, my dad’s first language was Welsh. During World War II, and his mum had died before he was even two years old, he was evacuated to Carmarthenshire, to Pontyberem, with a lovely couple who lived there. And they looked after him, he was initially educated in Welsh and then moved back to Swansea, and to Mumbles, where I’m from.
But weirdly I don’t remember Welsh being spoken very much. You would sometimes sing Welsh songs at school, and obviously you’d hear it through television. In the days before S4C, obviously you’d get Welsh language programming integrated into the BBC and ITV schedules, and I’d just sort of pick things up just from cadences or associations or just repetitions. [SW agrees] So my Welsh language knowledge is patchy really. We had Welsh lessons, the same way you’d have French lessons or Geography. But with Welsh, we’d had a very good teacher for a year, and then she left and we had a very ineffectual teacher, and I lost enthusiasm then. Particularly unfortunate because that was 1982/83, when S4C was just starting on television.
SIONED WILIAM
But that was very common, Justin. People had it drummed into them that it wasn’t worth anything. I lived in Barry as a kid, an English-speaking town, although we had a lot of Welsh speakers, but the message was: ‘Why pick that funny language, it’s gonna hold you back.’
My grandad was of the generation that had the ‘Welsh Not’ put around their necks. At the turn of the 20th century in Welsh schools, if a child was heard speaking Welsh in school, they had a piece of wood put round their neck with WN on it. They have examples of this on display in St Fagans Museum, near Cardiff. And if they then heard another child speaking Welsh, they’d put it round their neck. And if you had that round your neck at the end of the day, you were beaten in front of the whole school.
That was part of a culture that were doing their best to get rid of the language. My mother lived in Carmarthen where almost nobody spoke in English at all, but she was educated entirely through the medium of English. She was told she was just an uncivilised peasant. Emlyn Williams’ play The Corn is Green (1938)… that’s the same story. That the boy is brilliant, but he is civilised by learning English. There was no sense offered of this ancient rich culture and literature. And someone like me had the opposite; we only spoke Welsh at home, and my father was a writer, my grandfather was a professor of Welsh in fact, so there was a real interest in the culture in my house.
JUSTIN LEWIS
I think you can only really do it from speaking the language every day.
SIONED WILIAM
Things have changed so much. I think people realise that any bilingualism is really good for a child’s brain. When I was eleven, I had to go to Pontypridd [about 15 miles away] to a senior school that would teach me through the medium of Welsh. That school split eleven times, there are now eleven schools where there was one, but Barry has four junior Welsh-speaking schools. And in school there is greater ease with bilingualism than 20 or 30 years ago, and I think a lot of people feel a bit angry now as well. They were kind of fed this lie that it was going to hold them back.
JUSTIN LEWIS
It also, it occurs to me, never felt like we were taught much about Welsh history.
SIONED WILIAM
Well, this is true, and a scandal. They’re talking about this now in all sorts of areas of Welsh history.
JUSTIN LEWIS
Do you know that book by Richard King, Brittle with Relics (Faber, 2022)? It’s an oral history of Wales, from 1962 to 1997, it ends with the devolution referendum. And while I knew bits, there was so much I did not know – and I was living there for most of it!
SIONED WILIAM
But I’ll tell you what’s changed a lot in relation to the Welsh language is football. Football said: We own this language, it’s our right to this language. Half our team speak it, so we’re going to do press conferences in Welsh, we’re going to sing songs in Welsh, like Dafydd Iwan’s ‘Yma o Hyd’, which became this phenomenon, because they played it again and again and again in Cardiff Stadium, and everyone knew the words. Earlier last year, they invited him to sing before a Wales game, and he said, ‘Oh, they won’t have heard of me’, but when he went in, this predominantly English-speaking stadium went mad. He started to sing the song, and they joined in as they knew the words.
I didn’t in all my life think that would happen, that there would be this feeling of ‘We own this, we may not speak much of it, but it’s ours. We know that song, and that’s mine as well as yours…’ It’s so much healthier.
JUSTIN LEWIS
I was watching that Hywel Gwynfryn at 80 documentary that was on at Christmas.
SIONED WILIAM
Yes. It’s great.
JUSTIN LEWIS
I guess I first knew him from the children’s programmes that were on in the 70s like Bilidowcar (BBC Cymru, 1975–88), which was a sort of Welsh language equivalent of Blue Peter or Magpie. How on earth do you sum up a man like Hywel Gwynfryn, he seems to have done everything, he’s like a cross between Terry Wogan and John Noakes…
SIONED WILIAM
And a journalist on top of that. [He began his career on the BBC Cymru Wales news magazine, Heddiw in 1964.]
JUSTIN LEWIS
He is an integral part of Welsh language becoming a contemporary part of a changing world. As was your dad – I was re-reading his obituary in the Independent, written by Meic Stephens, who you mentioned earlier, and Stephens made the point of how entertainment as well as education was vital to the survival of a language. ‘We need quizzes, cartoons and pop songs in Welsh as much as we need philosophical treatises and historiography.’ [‘Obituary: Urien Wiliam’, The Independent, 26 October 2006]
SIONED WILIAM
Yes, that’s right.
JUSTIN LEWIS
And is it true – because it’s mentioned in the same piece – that your dad coined the Welsh word for ‘television’: ‘teledu’?
SIONED WILIAM
When a new word comes along, the Welsh Academy (like the Academy of France, in France) think of what the word might be in Welsh – obviously ‘television’ is both Greek and Latin in origin – and I think they did a competition for the best translation. My father won that competition, and I think he created the word ‘teledu’. We were always told that story as children. But to be honest with you, I’m not entirely sure every bit of that is true. Whether he had suggested a word, and then other people embellished it, I don’t know. But he was definitely part of that process.
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FIRST: TRWYNAU COCH: ‘Mynd i’r Capel Mewn Levis’ (Recordiau Sgwar, single, 1978)
[Currently not on YouTube. Or on Spotify, unfortunately! It was when we had the conversation. When they return, they will be reinstated here.]
SIONED WILIAM
When I was in the sixth form, and then an undergraduate in Aberystwyth, we used to go and see lots of live bands, and one of them was Trwynau Coch [‘The Red Noses’], this great punk band from Swansea that John Peel used to play. It was Huw Eurig, Rhys Harris and his twin brother Alun. They used to do songs like ‘I Want to Go to Chapel in Levis’ (‘Mynd i’r Capel Mewn Levis’, 1978) and when you saw them live, they were able to replicate their studio sound on stage rather well.
Although I think I may have bought a Tebot Piws [The Purple Teapot] one before then, who were this great, very funny band, with Dewi Pws.
And then there was Geraint Jarman and the Cynganeddwyr. Cynganedd is a particular strict metre of Welsh poetry. Geraint was a Cardiff boy, and he had these amazingly diverse band playing reggae, with people from all kinds of backgrounds in the band, so it wasn’t cultural appropriation as we know it today – but Geraint would sing in Welsh. It actually came from the Casablanca Club in Cardiff, they were fantastic to see live as well.
It was a great live scene at Aberystwyth. I also saw English bands too – Joe Jackson’s Jumpin’ Jive, one of the best gigs I’ve ever seen, and Squeeze, I even liked U2! And I loved Motown, always loved Stevie Wonder, stuff you could dance to.
JUSTIN LEWIS
What do you think was the effect of punk and new wave on Welsh music, did it create similar inspiration to that going on in English and American cities? How did it change perceptions in Welsh society?
SIONED WILIAM
Definitely. The fact that John Peel would play and give validation to these bands like Trwynau Coch, and Anrhefn, who were from mid-Wales – Rhys Mwyn, their co-founder is now a presenter with BBC Radio Cymru… Even though Peel didn’t understand what they were singing about, made us feel like somebody recognised our existence outside Wales. He made a huge impact. And Melody Maker and NME would review them. It made it feel more legitimate, part of a bigger picture.
JUSTIN LEWIS
I found a clip of John Peel on The Tube (Channel 4, 3 April 1987) introducing a band called Datblygu, who were very significant in the history of Welsh pop.
SIONED WILIAM
Yeah, he used to play them quite a lot.
JUSTIN LEWIS
I guess they had the same kind of spirit as The Fall, these very sardonic lyrics. In fact, there’s a really interesting documentary about them online (Prosiect Datblygu 2012 – this also has English subtitles).
SIONED WILIAM
Unfortunately, Dave [R Edwards, lyricist and founder] died not so long ago [2021], and they were seminal, a lot of people were very influenced by them. And they were kind of quite rude about Welsh language stuff, which nobody had had the courage to do before from the same background. When you have the confidence that your culture exists, you have the freedom to start being a little bit naughty then. But before then, you’re just struggling to survive. So it was a sign of maturity that Dave, like Datblygu, you know, could laugh at middle-class Welsh people.
—
JUSTIN LEWIS
Let me ask you about i dot, a music show you produced for S4C in Wales.
SIONED WILIAM
I did the first series (1996). I was working at Talkback at the time, but it must have been quiet. Huw Eurig who ran the production company Boomerang rang me up, and I thought it would be really good fun. It was a particularly magical period in Welsh music: we had Super Furry Animals, Catatonia, 60 Foot Dolls from Newport… Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci.
We recorded i dot in Newport and Bangor, in two different nightclubs, with a little moving set, and we had two really charismatic presenters: Daniel Glyn and Ffion Dafis, who’s a brilliant actress and novelist as well.
JUSTIN LEWIS
Obviously there had been previous Welsh pop shows, I remember Sêr (HTV Cymru) from when I was a kid, and Fideo 9 a bit later, which I think Geraint Jarman was involved in, right?
SIONED WILIAM
Fideo 9 (Cwmni Criw Byw/S4C, 1988–93) was a seminal programme, yeah. With directors making films, people like Endaf Emlyn – this was the age of the MTV video – and again, there was this flowering of Welsh language music that’s still going strong. But back when I was a kid, they had Disc a Dawn (BBC Cymru, 1966–73) with the wonderful Mici Plwm, which was like Top of the Pops. Twndish (BBC Cymru, 1977–79) was another one. They kind of evolved over the years. i dot, I think there were two or three series. I could only do the first one, I think I was doing Big Train after that.
——
LAST: CARWYN ELLIS & RIO 18: Joia! (2019, Recordiau Agati/Banana & Louie Records)
Extract: ‘Tywydd Hufen Iâ’
JUSTIN LEWIS
Moving on to more recent Welsh language artists, I knew about Gruff Rhys’s Griffiths, but I hadn’t heard the Carwyn Ellis album with Rio 18, especially this record with the National Orchestra of Wales.
SIONED WILIAM
Carwyn Ellis is a clever guy. He plays in Chrissie Hynde’s band – in fact, there’s a song to her on this, called ‘Joia’, with this Latin American rhythm all the way through, in fact all through the whole album. Absolutely stunning. We’d play this driving down to Italy, my son Macsen would insist on having this wide variety of things.
It’s really interesting how many good Welsh session musicians there are. Carwyn, Peredur ap Gwynedd, his brother Rheinallt, an excellent guitarist, they’ve played with everyone. And Pino Palladino, who played with Geraint Jarman…
JUSTIN LEWIS
Yes, that’s Pino on ‘Wherever I Lay My Hat (That’s My Home)’ by Paul Young, amongst many other things, which of course begins with this bass part straight out of the beginning of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring! I knew he was from Cardiff, but not of his early work.
SIONED WILIAM
He played with a lot of Welsh bands, I remember.
JUSTIN LEWIS
And you’ve also brought Parisa Fouladi, a newer name, to my attention. Again, reggae influences there.
SIONED WILIAM
Again, it’s that internationalist approach, she’s Welsh-Iranian, people from a lot of different backgrounds – but singing in Welsh. It’s fantastic.
JUSTIN LEWIS
I was thinking about how this internationalist relationship between Welsh language music and the rest of the world often seems more profound than the English language connection. [SW agrees] When I was about six, 1976, I saw this weekly series on BBC 1, in Welsh – I’d forgotten the title but I have now established it was called Y Tir Newydd [‘The New Land’, BBC Cymru, Summer 1976]. It was a group of musicians playing American songs but with Welsh lyrics. Things like ‘Freight Train’. The singers were Mari Griffith who I’d seen on that schools programme Music Time…
SIONED WILIAM
Oh I loved her, she had a brilliant singing voice, great guitarist.
JUSTIN LEWIS
…And Emyr Wyn. And the theme to the series was a translated version of ‘America’ from West Side Story, which I don’t think I’d ever heard in English. I didn’t question why this was on, just saw it every week, and doing research for this, I discovered they made it for the 1976 bicentenary. And I got this feeling, ‘Oh okay, and this is something I’m not getting from English language television at the moment.’ It’s funny how you absorb things sometimes.
SIONED WILIAM
Yes. Emyr Wyn another great singer. I think what’s so key is with almost every presenter on Welsh television, they can do other things, playing an instrument, singing a song. It’s fascinating.
JUSTIN LEWIS
And of course, you fit into this category yourself. You were regularly on radio and television in Wales, presenting before you became associated with comedy.
SIONED WILIAM
Yes. When I was a student, at Aberystwyth, I started doing that and after I graduated, this lovely producer at HTV called Dorothy Williams very kindly offered me a chat show – which was probably terrible! And I did lots for them, reviewed films, and then did a show with Elinor Talfan, a sort of afternoon cookery show, which was great fun. And because I was a post-graduate student at the time, it was good money!
Prior to this, I had been doing a drama degree at Aberystwyth. I was very very lucky because at the time I was there, Mike Pearson (who sadly died last year) and the Brith Gof theatre company (founded in 1981) were part of a company that came from Cardiff Lab, this extraordinary movement, the Third Theatre they called it, were also teaching at Aberystwyth at the time. So I got the most incredible opportunities to work with people from all over the world. I did three shows with Brith Gof, and then we did lots of Stanislavsky and Chekhov. It was a brilliant, enlightened degree, very academic as well, but we did lots of performing and lots of touring and stuff. I did Japanese Noh theatre, did a show in Harlech Castle, we did a promenade performance round the villages of West Wales.
I had three years there, and then I got a grant to do further research, and went to Royal Holloway College for two terms but they didn’t mention to me that the person I was going to be working with wasn’t there anymore, she’d left! So I wrote to John Kelly at Jesus College, Oxford, because he was the only person I knew who was an expert in Sean O’Casey, who I was studying. So I had to get the university at Aberystwyth to send my degree dissertation and then have it translated into English. My English wasn’t brilliant at that point, not academically brilliant anyway, you know. And then I got a place at Jesus, because a student there hated it so much they decided to transfer to Aberystwyth.
I arrived at Oxford [summer 1983], and I auditioned straight away for as many plays as I could get into. I got into something called the Oxford Revue, but it wasn’t the real one, it was an alternative to it. I’ll tell you who was in it, was John Sparkes! Who wasn’t a student, but was great fun. Pooky Quesnel was in it as well.
JUSTIN LEWIS
And then you formed a double act with Rebecca Front. The Bobo Girls. How did that come about?
SIONED WILIAM
We went to Edinburgh, did a show, and Rebecca had written one of the songs for it. And then, in the autumn, I went back to Oxford, and finally got to meet Rebecca through the proper Oxford Revue, and Patrick Marber too.
JUSTIN LEWIS
We should probably explain the Bobo Girls a little, for those who don’t know. You performed sketches, often written by Rebecca’s brother Jeremy Front [who now writes the Charles Paris Mysteries on Radio 4, amongst many many other things]. But you also performed these songs that Rebecca wrote. So it became clear that you both loved singing, and this was going to work?
SIONED WILIAM
Absolutely. Also, there wasn’t much for women to do in the Oxford Revue items. I always used to say we got very good at filing because we were playing so many secretaries. So after that first year, we decided to try and write our own stuff, and in 85 we went to Edinburgh and again in 87, got on Radio 4’s Aspects of the Fringe both times, did residencies at places like the Canal Café in London. And eventually, 1989 and 1991, we did two series for Radio 4 [called Girls Will Be Girls]. And Armando Iannucci produced the second series. But there weren’t many opportunities outside that, there weren’t panel games or Taskmaster, those things didn’t exist, really.
JUSTIN LEWIS
And by then, from ’88, you were a staff producer in BBC Radio Light Entertainment – and you went on to produce one of the great Alan Partridge half-hours, Knowing Knowing Me Knowing You (Radio 4, 3 July 1993). The Knowing Me Knowing You series, produced by Armando, had won the Sony Award, so you made this special mock ‘celebratory behind-the-scenes’ documentary. For a long time it was a bit of a lost gem.
SIONED WILIAM
It was just the most enormous fun. We only had two days in the studio, and at first there wasn’t a shape to anything because they were just so used to improvising, brilliantly. The one contribution I think I made was to say, ‘Let’s find a story, have a beginning, a middle and an end’. But they knew each other so well by then, the character was so rounded. And Rebecca playing Carol, Alan’s wife, weeping, in the background. It was very funny. But I was producing because Armando, who was usually the producer, wanted to be in it as well.
JUSTIN LEWIS
Yes, as ‘Mario Santini’! I love that little running joke where he keeps having to go back to the Fifteen-to-One production office, which I think is a coded reference to the fact that at the time he was working with Chris Morris on getting The Day Today off the ground for television. But I love all the stuff about the hierarchy of guests, the availability of guests. And then a few months after I heard that, I saw The Larry Sanders Show for the first time.
SIONED WILIAM
You know I’m in an episode of Larry Sanders, do you?
JUSTIN LEWIS
That’s crazy! Which one?
SIONED WILIAM
It’s in the very last series. I’m not really in it! I’m sitting in the [chat show] audience with my husband Ian. We were on a tour of Universal Studios, and someone asked if we wanted to be in the audience for Larry Sanders. It was fantastic. It was one where Jon Stewart was hosting it because Larry (Garry Shandling) was ill, and there’s the Nazi Jeopardy sketch with Hank, and the studio executive characters are horrified, and there’s one shot where me and Ian are sitting behind them. [‘Adolf Hankler’, S6 E6, aired in the US on 19 April 1998.] And later, we met Fred Barron, who had been instrumental in getting Sanders and Seinfeld off the ground. So that’s my connection with Sanders, a bit nerdy but it’s a good one.
JUSTIN LEWIS
And of course, you produced Jonathan Ross’s chat show for a while, in the early 90s, but I did not know that you’d been planning a radio pilot with Vic and Bob.
SIONED WILIAM
Yes, I’d been to see them live in Deptford in 1989. I’m not sure we ever got to make that pilot. I’ve got some of their original documents for it somewhere, which I treasure. We offered it to Radio 1 and they didn’t get it at all.
JUSTIN LEWIS
You went back to BBC Radio in 2015 as Commissioner of Comedy. What are you most proud of commissioning from your time back there?
SIONED WILIAM
I’m very proud of bringing Alexei Sayle back to Radio 4 [Imaginary Sandwich Bar]. Michael Spicer’s The Room Next Door. Jon Holmes’ The Skewer, which won 28 awards. There’s a great series on medicine coming from Kiri Pritchard McLean. But also bringing people like Mae Martin, Rosie Jones, who we had before anyone else. Lost Voice Guy. Tez Ilyas. Lots of younger women, but lots of older women too. Conversations from a Long Marriage by Jan Etherington, for Roger Allam and Joanna Lumley.
JUSTIN LEWIS
I was especially interested in something you said on the Kay Stonham podcast (Female Pilot Club) recently. You mentioned how you might greenlight something, and say, ‘I don’t entirely get this, but I trust the performers and producers’. You might not like everything the department makes but something still intrigues you about it.
SIONED WILIAM
Yeah. Or you know the audience loves it. There are shows the audience will get, they might not make me laugh, but they’re very popular, greatly loved, and the best they could be. Or things that were a bit weird that I was too old to appreciate, but you knew that the young people involved were brilliant. That’s how Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy got on the air in the 70s, they believed in Geoffrey Perkins as a producer. I think it’s your job to put the odd thing on that you don’t quite understand. One famous show, a real Marmite show, I never quite got myself, and it might not necessarily be my bag, but people adore it so much, it’s the bag of the core audience. It’s not my place to stop it, and with any comedy, nobody can agree on what’s funny.
Also, there are things I saw on stage that would never work on Radio 4 because it’s too much about being in the room with them. It’s very hard to take improv out of the live situation, it’s like gossamer. You couldn’t put the Radio 4 microscope on it – it would diminish it.
And there were other calls I made. Miles Jupp and Andy Zaltzman taking over The News Quiz. Sue Perkins taking over Just a Minute after Nicholas Parsons…
JUSTIN LEWIS
Just a Minute’s a good example of something that you almost couldn’t imagine without Nicholas, and it’s a different thing now, but it still works. Same with I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue. I remember when Humphrey Lyttelton died, and you couldn’t imagine anyone else doing it – and yet it continues. So you left the department last year?
SIONED WILIAM
I felt ready to go. It had been seven years. I wasn’t made redundant, it had been great, but I didn’t want to get jaded with it, and also with Covid, I realised that I wanted to do a range of things in my life and not sit in an office all day. It was the right point to go.
JUSTIN LEWIS
Are you going back to programme making, in comedy production? Or are you concentrating on more novel writing?
SIONED WILIAM
I’m back to the freelance life – exec producing some telly projects, broadcasting and writing. And I’ve really enjoyed doing the rounds of literary festivals with my latest book.
JUSTIN LEWIS
Was writing an area you always wanted to get into? Because this is novel number four, is it?
SIONED WILIAM
It did take me a long time to find a voice. I mulled over the first book for about four years before I sent a few chapters to the publisher. It’s the kind of thing you take on holiday with you, and there’s a bit of satire in there – not entirely pulpy, but it is entertaining. And this next book is actually about people that going to Italy to a holiday home, but it’s got parallels perhaps with Wales.
——
ANYTHING: MADNESS: The Liberty of Norton Folgate (2009, Stirling Holdings Limited/Union Square/BMG)
Extract: ‘The Liberty of Norton Folgate’
SIONED WILIAM
I always loved their videos and songs in the 80s, but I’d kind of forgotten about them until my son, who was then in his teens, saw them – this is so strange – on Strictly Come Dancing, in the guest music slot, around 2016. And he said, God, these are good. He became obsessed with them, and of course, I had no idea that they had this massive body of recent work, like Norton Folgate (2009), which is just absolutely magnificent.
JUSTIN LEWIS
I can’t work out how they did it all, especially early on. Because they were all so young, even though I know there were seven of them, and they all wrote songs in various combinations; they all co-wrote at least one major hit single.
[They really did. Here’s the evidence.
Mike Barson (keyboards):
‘My Girl’, ‘Night Boat to Cairo’, ‘Embarrassment’, ‘Return of the Los Palmas 7’, ‘Grey Day’, ‘House of Fun’, ‘Driving in My Car’, ‘Tomorrow’s Just Another Day’, ‘The Sun and the Rain’, ‘Lovestruck’, ‘NW5’.
Graham McPherson (aka Suggs) (vocals):
‘Night Boat to Cairo’, ‘Baggy Trousers’, ‘Shut Up’, ‘Wings of a Dove’, ‘One Better Day’, ‘Yesterday’s Men’, ‘
Waiting for the Ghost Train’.
Chris Foreman (guitar):
‘Baggy Trousers’, ‘Shut Up’, ‘Cardiac Arrest’, ‘Our House’, ‘Yesterday’s Men’, ‘Uncle Sam’.
Lee Thompson (saxophone, percussion):
‘The Prince’, ‘Embarrassment’, ‘House of Fun’, ‘Uncle Sam’, ‘Lovestruck’, ‘NW5’.
Dan Woodgate (drums, percussion):
‘Return of the Los Palmas 7’, ‘Michael Caine’.
Mark Bedford (bass guitar):
‘Return of the Los Palmas 7’, ‘One Better Day’.
Carl Smyth (aka Chas Smash) (vocals):
‘Cardiac Arrest’, ‘Our House’, ‘Tomorrow’s Just Another Day’, ‘Wings of a Dove’, ‘Michael Caine’.
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SIONED WILIAM
Yeah. These little vignettes of London life, incredibly beautiful, and well written. So I suppose I rediscovered them through my son. I then saw some stuff that Suggs had done and thought, ‘Gosh, he’s very funny and he’d bring a slightly different listenership to Radio 4.’ So he did these shows [in 2019], Love Letters to London, walking around London just as he’d been this kid who had wandered around London on his own, on the buses, you know, while his mother was working at the Colony Club. But in general, as a family, we’re big Madness fans. We’ve seen them live now a few times.
JUSTIN LEWIS
How does the live set work now? Is it a mixture of new-ish and the hits?
SIONED WILIAM
I went to the 40th anniversary show [2019], and the first half was sort of ‘unplugged’, lots of stuff I’d never heard before. Then, more familiar stuff, but also things like ‘Bullingdon Boys’ (2019), stuff from the last two albums, which I know quite well. And then obviously, they build up to things like ‘Night Boat to Cairo’ at the end.
But then there’s also the Suggs solo stuff, things like ‘Green Eyes’, and my favourite song is ‘Powder Blue’, which is about him and his wife [Bette Bright, formerly a member of the band Deaf School]. They’ve had this obviously wild night, saying their pop star friends have all gone home, they’re both listening to Aretha Franklin. It’s very funny, but it’s very beautiful, nobody would really connect it with Madness.
They were a very political band, always – singing about racism, homelessness, Thatcherism – and still are. ‘Norton Folgate’ is about immigration, and there’s this huge range of fantastic Turkish instruments on it. It’s about looking out into the world and welcoming culture into London and how London’s the melting pot. It’s an ode to joy to cultural richness. Quite often, their stuff is about the little person trying to make their way in the world, encountering all sorts of difficult things, but with a musicality I can’t get over.
——
JUSTIN LEWIS
I was interested to find out what you, as a comedy commissioner, made of the sitcom pilot they made in 1984. It’s quite a curio, this little test-tape, shot on location.
‘MADNESS: THE PILOT’ (Talkback Productions, 1984)
SIONED WILIAM
It’s fascinating, isn’t it? I didn’t realise it was written by Ben Elton and Richard Curtis.
JUSTIN LEWIS
Just after The Young Ones finished. It was the first thing they wrote together, I believe – shortly afterwards they started work on Blackadder II. And produced by Geoff Posner, who at the time was working with Lenny Henry and about to start working with Victoria Wood (As Seen on TV).
SIONED WILIAM
It looked like Geoff, one of the great comedy directors and producers, probably had to do it in about a day for about 20p. But the Madness boys all had so much personality and charisma. Geoff gave it as much style as he could in what was obviously a very short amount of time, but I don’t know why they didn’t take them because they could have been brilliant.
JUSTIN LEWIS
This was one of the first two pilots made for television by Talkback [set up by Mel Smith and Griff Rhys Jones initially to make radio commercials]. The other was a vehicle for Frankie Howerd, but neither of them made it to the screen. The Madness one eventually turned up as part of a DVD boxset they released, called Gogglebox (2011).
But I remember reading about that pilot about a year before they made it, in Smash Hits, and because I’d seen The Young Ones and obviously they’d guested in it, I could picture this three-camera studio sitcom, with an audience. Although I also remember thinking, even then, ‘But Madness have already found their ideal comic medium, and it’s the promotional video.’
SIONED WILIAM
Yeah, they made fantastic videos. Clever, funny, literate, as were their songs.
JUSTIN LEWIS
Can pop groups do sitcom, I wonder? Could there be another Monkees?
SIONED WILIAM
Can there even be another sitcom?! The age of the sitcom has passed, to be honest with you. We seem to have these hybrids, some better than others, some hyper-real, some more surreal. Now, say if you were to do a sitcom with Madness now, you could either go hyper-real and make it gritty, or you go with these flights of fancy.
JUSTIN LEWIS
What are you enjoying at the moment, comedy-wise?
SIONED WILIAM
The Windsors makes me laugh out loud. Derry Girls, unashamedly funny but poignant and moving at times. And there’s this thing on Sky called Extraordinary, this kind of magical realism comedy, it’s about every single person having a superpower. It’s full of flights of fancy and it’s surreal but terribly touching as well. Colin from Accounts, more of a soap than a comedy, but really delightful. So I would say that sitcom’s just evolved into a different shape. There’s some fantastic new stuff out there. I don’t want to be the dinosaur who bemoans the end of sitcom, though I am sad that nobody wants to write Frasier anymore, which seems to me to be the difficult thing to do. It is much easier to do something that’s mildly amusing.
JUSTIN LEWIS
Not Going Out seems to be the last one standing now in Britain. And they’ll still try things like do a live episode, or one in real time.
SIONED WILIAM
And there’s Mrs Brown’s Boys, which is more panto than sitcom. But there isn’t the appetite to do a Seinfeld or Frasier now – it costs too much, they won’t pay a room full of writers. This is what the writers’ strike in America is all about. That infrastructure that allows you to make shows like Brooklyn Nine-Nine or Big Bang Theory. It’s very difficult now to get that kind of level of funding to create these brilliant lines. There was some wonderful story about how the Frasier writing room would be silent for about two hours while they just tried to think what Daphne might say to Dr Crane, which had to be something Daphne would say, but which would also move the plot on.
JUSTIN LEWIS
It’s funny how the world of television has never been so diverse in terms of who’s on there – rightly so, obviously! – and yet the range of programmes has never been so narrow. Because all these people could be appearing on, could be making, so many different things – but so many genres seem to have a house style.
SIONED WILIAM
That’s a real worry, yeah, and with comedians, they seem to be used in every way apart from being funny, so they’re going fishing or cooking. The amount of factual entertainment you get now with comedians because it’s cheaper, and they don’t have to write anything.
But just in general, the notion of spending all that time working on a weekly script with a room full of people… it never really existed in this country. And there’s not a hope in hell of it happening now, because people’s choices have changed. And something else we’ve lost: you used to be able to put your hand over the side of a page of script and know who was speaking from the line of dialogue. There’s so many shows now where everybody has the same voice.
—
JUSTIN LEWIS
We have got this far, and we somehow haven’t mentioned Bob Dylan. I have been aware for a while you are a massive fan.
SIONED WILIAM
I first heard Dylan while I was a postgraduate student at Oxford. My boyfriend at the time, John, was a huge fan, had all the bootlegs and went to see him at every possible opportunity. I had always bought into the cliché that Dylan couldn’t sing but when I saw Dont Look Back at the cinema, belting out his songs with such power and charisma, I completely changed my mind. He’s so funny and smart in that film. And then I heard the live version of ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ in Manchester – extraordinary – and the Pennebaker film when he’s with The Band. I love all his different phases, even the religious stuff and Nashville Skyline and that wonderful trilogy of American Classics albums he did a few years ago [2015–17]. And my son and I always play the Christmas Album [Christmas in the Heart] every year – we love the arrangements!
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You can follow Sioned on Twitter at @sionedwiliam.
Her four novels, Dal i Fynd (2013), Chwynnu (2017), Cicio’r Bar (2018) and Y Gwyliau (2023) are published by Y Lolfa.
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FLA 22 PLAYLIST
Sioned Wiliam
(For the time being, this site and project uses Spotify for the conversation playlists, but obviously I disapprove that Spotify doesn’t pay artists and composers properly, and other streaming platforms are available, as are sites to buy downloads and buy recordings. For consistency, you can also listen to the selections via YouTube (where available), and links are provided in each case, below.)
Track 1: RALPH VAUGHAN WILLIAMS: ‘Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis’
Academy of St Martin in the Fields, Sir Neville Marriner: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P04yfGRNebM
Track 2: WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART: The Magic Flute: ‘Ach, ich Fühl’
Renée Fleming, Orchestra of St. Luke’s, Sir Charles Mackerras: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjbY2-U2_MI
Track 3: GEORG FRIDERIC HANDEL: Ariodante: ‘Scherza Infida’
Ann Murray, Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, Sir Charles Mackerras: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pj2NKIPta0w
Track 4: TRWYNAU COCH: ‘Mynd I’r Capel Mewn Levis’ [Currently not on YouTube or on Spotify but will be reinstated here when it is]
Track 5: HEATHER JONES: ‘Cwm Hiraeth’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xzmqws-K5kc
Track 6: GERAINT JARMAN A’R CYNGANEDDWYR: ‘Gwesty Cymru’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E9TWFZ7Wc_c
Track 7: JOE JACKSON: ‘It’s Different for Girls’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLDFG5vm5kA
Track 8: STEVIE WONDER: ‘I Don’t Know Why’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_QtgkxwG1Ew
Track 9: SQUEEZE: ‘Pulling Mussels (from a Shell)’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hn0Rzi1s5iU
Track 10: SUPER FURRY ANIMALS: ‘Ysbeidiau Heulog’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cttikLIQnMg
Track 11: CARWYN ELLIS: ‘Tywydd Hufen Ia’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZPhTQ2QfOc
Track 12: MADNESS: ‘The Liberty of Norton Folgate’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X8BDcn-rSA
Track 13: MADNESS: ‘The Sun and the Rain’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_9FeMMlLZw
Track 14: MADNESS: ‘Powder Blue’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePLFqfzcqO8
Track 15: BOB DYLAN: ‘Tangled Up in Blue’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKcNyMBw818
Track 16: BOB DYLAN: ‘If Not for You’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yyouhbgAiCA
Track 17: BOB DYLAN: ‘Blind Willie McTell’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_AIRdU6CPf0
Track 18: BOB DYLAN: ‘Like a Rolling Stone’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IwOfCgkyEj0
Track 19: BOB DYLAN: ‘Mozambique’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4K_YPW-_Vnk
Track 20: SIDAN: ‘Cymylau’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zjVwMVbYkQ
Track 21: ENDAF EMLYN: ‘Macrall wedi Ffrio’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVJOxRCWVF0
Track 22: MEIC STEVENS: ‘Tryweryn’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fok0IlnYEXI
Track 23: MEIC STEVENS: ‘Y Brawd Hwdini’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XA5fqsMneEc
FIRST LAST ANYTHING 