Episode 1 Wales on the One Show

Hello, shw mae? I'm Alex Jones.

No, this isn't the usual One Show,

this is a very special edition all about my home country of Wales.

This is the studio and usually, I'd be sat on the sofa over there

with Matt or Chris.

Our celebrity guests would be sitting there

and people would be running around frantically.

But today, it's just you and me and this pile of Welsh films

made by BBC Wales especially for The One Show.

It's special to me

when we've got films about Wales but today we've got five of them,

so sit back and enjoy Wales On The One Show.

Coming up - science fact or fiction?

Marty Jobson investigates

a Swansea inventor's bizarre weapon of mass destruction.

-CRACK!

-BLEEP

You didn't warn me about that!

Jay Rayner tucks into the original Welsh takeaway in Neath.

There is no way to do this elegantly!

Riots in north Wales -

Joe Crawley meets former residents of Capel Celyn.

Hidden beneath these troubled waters

lie the remains of a once-happy village.

# Gloria... #

And Giles Brandreth experiences the power of song in Swansea.

Standing here, you would have been faced with 300 chimneys

belching clouds of thick orange smoke that blocked out the sun.

It was like a volcano erupting.

But first, let's start with one of the strangest chapters ever

in Welsh history.

Angellica Bell bravely went back in time to Fishguard in Pembrokeshire

where it was all kicking off.

BRASS BAND PLAYS "LA MARSEILLAISE"

Most people think the last invasion of Britain was at Hastings in 1066.

But they're wrong.

That dubious claim to fame belongs to Fishguard here in west Wales.

In 1797, 1,400 French troops landed at Carreg Wastad near Fishguard.

Equipped with 50 tons of grenades and 2,000 guns,

they swarmed inland. Things looked bleak.

Fishguard's volunteer army were out working in the fields

and the fort only had three cannonballs.

Arretez! Tournez!

Since their revolution eight years earlier,

the French had been spreading ideals of liberty,

equality and fraternity across Europe.

They'd been at war with Britain for years. Now, they were in Fishguard.

This was the farmhouse belonging to John Mortimer.

-It became the French headquarters.

-Why did they choose Fishguard?

It was never meant to be Fishguard. They never intended to come here.

The plan was that there was to be an invasion of Ireland.

In order for the invasion of Ireland to work,

there had to be two diversionary raids to pull the English fleets

away from them, one to Newcastle and one to Bristol.

The one to Newcastle never happened.

Bristol - that's this lot.

They got as far as Lundy Island

and they realised the wind and tide were against them

so they turned around, sailed up the Welsh coast and came to Fishguard.

What did they want to achieve?

They thought that Wales was a hotbed of revolution

and that the Welsh, when they saw these Frenchmen, would join them.

They'd rise up, they would throw off the yoke of English tyranny

and join the French and so take England out of the war.

But the French liberators did little to enlist Welsh support.

Discovering large quantities of wine, which locals had salvaged

from a recent wreck, they were soon drunk and running amok.

A raiding party even looted St Gwyndaf's church and set fire to it.

Phil, tell us what the army would have been like?

To put it mildly, they were the worst soldiers ever.

Most of this legion were made up of convicts or soldiers

who nobody else wanted.

Nobody was going to risk good soldiers

on what was a fairly forlorn hope.

-They came ashore and they were out of control.

-They desecrated this place.

-They did.

If you look here, this is the Bible. They rip it to shreds.

They take out whole chapters, whole chunks of it

and use it as material to light fires.

The French had no concept of its importance.

All they were concerned about was, this was a means of keeping warm.

This was fuel. It wasn't just the Bible. Look at this.

That chalice was stolen by the French,

later turned up in Carmarthen, would you believe!

Somebody had tried to sell it in Carmarthen.

Allerons, mes amis!

By now, the locals had had enough of their uninvited guests.

Legend has it that Jemima Nicholas, a cobbler's wife,

armed herself with a pitchfork and captured 12 drunken Frenchmen.

Hundreds of women in red shawls

are said to have masqueraded as British soldiers

to scare off the invaders, who were beginning to mutiny.

Is there any truth in these stories about the women of Fishguard?

At this distance, it's very hard to say.

The fact has been mixed up with the fable

and it's become a fantasy.

But what is true is that the Welsh women in their red shawls

and their black hats did come to witness what was going on.

The French, from a distance, frightened, half-drunk,

desperate to get out of this situation,

probably did mistake them for soldiers.

It does seem a bit of a farce!

The whole story is one of farce.

It's worthy of Gilbert and Sullivan.

A small British army eventually showed up

and the invaders surrendered immediately in the local pub.

The entire French Army was marched off to prison,

having achieved very little apart from putting Fishguard on the map.

After just three days, their last invasion of Britain collapsed.

And nobody's been brave enough to try it again since.

CHEERING AND SHOUTING

Incredible story. You never know, if the French hadn't found all that wine,

maybe things would have turned out differently.

I'd probably be working on La Une Show now.

Multilingual, you see?

Enough of this warmongering. It's time to give PEAS a chance.

Faggots and peas, to be precise.

Who better to go in search of the Welsh delicacy

than One Show foodie Jay Rayner?

Take a look at the British High Street

and you'll have a fantastic choice of Italian, Indian,

Chinese or American takeaways.

But we have a takeaway tradition dating back to the 1800s

which makes the doner kebab look like a Johnny-come-lately.

In chippies all over Wales and the West Midlands,

you can find this takeaway tradition still thriving.

Faggots and peas.

Takeaway faggots and peas paved the way for modern fast food.

Since the 1920s, Neath Market in west Wales

has hosted faggot-sellers.

Frances Loaring's gran Katie started this stall.

Four generations of her family

have sold eat-in or takeaway faggots from it ever since.

It's warming, it's cheap. It's filling.

I think people are going back to that sort of food, as well.

You know, home-made food.

Who likes to buy them?

One fellow came from South Africa.

Before he even went to visit his family,

he got off the train at Neath station

and he came in here straightaway.

Faggots first became popular in the mid-19th century

as cheap food for the urban poor.

But why should WE be bothered eating them 150 years later?

Traditional faggots deserve to be given credit

for using the whole beast and not just the prime cuts.

The hungry poor in the 19th century knew that if you killed an animal,

you ought to eat the whole thing.

That's a lesson that those of us in the 21st century ought to learn.

Faggots use the pig's heart, lungs, liver,

meat and fat that would otherwise go to waste.

Butcher Gareth Cole supplies the faggots for Frances' stall.

The recipe's come right through from my great-grandfather.

I've managed to get my hands on it now.

-How many faggots do you eat a week?

-Three or four...at a time!

So have faggots made you the man you are today?

Can't you tell?

Why pigs' offal?

Well, swine were more likely to be kept close by

in the rapidly-expanding urban areas of Wales and the Midlands

but, in recent times, the public have turned away from offal

and faggots have gone out of fashion.

Even so, Gareth still manages to sell 2,000 of them a week.

I can see why.

There's no way to do this elegantly.

Oh!

That's really, really good.

It's not pretty, but it's good.

But will the public be put off by the offal content?

I hope not.

-Never have been very keen on them.

-Really?

-Yeah.

-What's in 'em?

-Quite a bit of offal, bit of pig's lip... Is that it?

Yeah. That's probably what it is.

-I don't like them.

-You don't like them?!

They're made out of liver and...no.

-Do you not like offal?

-No.

When I was a little boy, I used to come regular into the shop here,

have faggots and peas. I don't know what faggots are made of, mind.

Very nice.

Very good faggots.

So despite a few offal-dodgers, Frances still has plenty of fans.

In an age when the British public

seems to prefer sanitised, pretty meat products,

it's really good to see old-fashioned, offal-rich faggots

holding their own.

Mm.

That's exactly my sort of thing. It's not sophisticated or subtle

but it's dense, meaty and savoury.

On a very cold day in Neath, it's exactly what I want.

Yes, luckily they do taste loads better than they look.

If only somebody could leak that secret recipe

to the BBC canteen here in London,

they'd make a lot of ex-pats very happy.

Now, I found this next film really quite moving

when we first showed it.

It seems that many of you felt the same way.

After it went out, loads of people got in touch.

The response was overwhelming.

Here it is - Joe Crowley's tale of a lost village.

Shining amid the hills of north Wales,

Llyn Celyn is a cold, deep lake.

It may look like it's been here forever, but it hasn't.

Hidden beneath the troubled waters

lie the remains of a once-happy village.

A village which changed Welsh history.

Capel Celyn was a traditional Welsh-speaking village.

Families had lived there for generations,

farming the valley and attending chapel.

Well, it was typical of a Welsh community in the '50s and '60s.

Very tight, very friendly.

Very, very fond memories, really. Time in school was a real pleasure.

It revolved, really, more around nature

and all the things you could find.

Yeah, there is me, there.

That is me. That's really weird.

Very smart, in your double-breasted blazer.

To look at these faces, going back 30 years, is really strange.

Really eerie. Spooky. Like ghosts.

The children expected one day they'd farm the valley, like their parents.

But, in 1955, the outside world came crashing in.

The people of Capel Celyn received compulsory purchase orders.

Their entire valley was to become a reservoir.

Their homes, farms and memories were to be lost forever.

60 miles away, Liverpool wanted extra water

for post-war regeneration

and had chosen the Tryweryn Valley, with its narrow neck

perfect for damming.

Despite local opposition, planning permission wasn't required

as Liverpool Corporation had the backing of a parliamentary bill.

It didn't really become reality until you actually saw places

that you thought were going to be there forever

coming down in front of your eyes.

It was greeted with disbelief that such a thing had happened.

But it was irreversible.

As the dam slowly rose, residents were permitted

to exhume their loved ones from the graveyard

before it was bulldozed.

My parents never spoke about it.

I don't think they could bring themselves to imagine

that such a thing would ever happen.

They believed, once you were dead and buried, you were in peace.

Capel Celyn was soon razed to the ground

but the school was left standing till last.

TRANSLATION FROM WELSH:

Well, I remember the sound of the chainsaws coming closer and closer.

The bulldozers, the mud, the dust, the uncertainty,

the black cloud came closer and closer and closer,

until eventually it swallowed up our school.

And destroyed it.

On the day the reservoir was opened, passions ran high.

The loss of Capel Celyn

had a profound impact on Welsh national identity.

There was the cultural argument

that villages that still held to Welsh traditions

were getting increasingly rare

and to destroy one was an act of vandalism.

There was a feeling that,

well, at least we've got MPs that would give the Welsh view.

They did give the Welsh view

and nobody took any notice of them at all.

Wales, at the beginning of the 21st-century,

is a much different place.

If one looks at a single source causing that change,

I would say Tryweryn.

My mother was born in the valley.

In their last years, you could see how the trauma had affected them

and they were just talking about the valley all the time,

asking, "Is the water coming? Is the home still there?"

It's impossible to imagine, for someone like me,

who never knew it any other way, that it could be different, really.

It is difficult for me, as well.

Despite what they've done, it's still a very, very beautiful place.

And there are still people here. We're still here. We always will be.

In 2005, Liverpool City Council finally apologised

for what happened here.

Some may have forgiven them. But few will forget.

As the 40-year-old graffiti still says, "remember Tryweryn".

"Cofiwch Dryweryn" - "remember Tryweryn".

I've driven past that sign so many times

on my way home from Aberystwyth

and I think it'll probably be there for a long time to come.

Now, if you live in Swansea,

you might recognise this recently-erected statue.

It's Harry Grindell Matthews,

who had a laboratory high in the hills of Betws.

Back in the '30s, the world quaked in terror

at news of his latest invention.

Here is Marty Jobson with the electrifying tale.

The death ray, a terrifying beam of light.

From Archimedes to HG Wells, it was once the stuff of legend.

But in the 1920s, it stopped being science fiction.

The prospect of a real death ray seemed frighteningly close.

Harry Grindell Matthews was an inventor from Gloucestershire.

He was renowned for dreaming up futuristic prototypes,

including an early mobile phone,

which he demonstrated at Buckingham Palace.

But his most infamous invention was a beam of light

said to be capable of knocking enemy aeroplanes out of the sky.

The press called it his death ray.

This remarkable footage has never been seen on television before.

It shows Matthews testing his death ray,

which he claimed could kill rats, detonate gunpowder

and stop an engine, all from 60 feet away.

After the stalemate of World War I,

the press hoped this sensational new weapon would give Britain the edge.

So, on the 26th of May 1924, a delegation of academics,

high Pooh-Bahs from the military and scientists,

-all came to Grindell Matthews' laboratory to see his death ray.

-That's right, yes.

-Right. So, here it is. This is my contraption.

-Wow!

This is my death ray and it's pointing over there

at that petrol motor that we're going to knock out.

'Of course, this is just a mock-up of Matthews' experiment.'

I never thought a wastepaper basket could look quite so sinister.

Talk me through it. What is it we've made here?

-At the bottom would have been the electrical generator.

-What's in here?

In here, you've got a source of ultraviolet light.

-You get to be Grindell Matthews.

-Brilliant. I get to fire the contraption?

-Yes. You get the dirty lab coat.

-I've got it on, it fits.

-That looks good.

Three, two, one, fire!

MOTOR STUTTERS TO A HALT

And it goes off! Brilliant.

The generals on that day witnessed that.

AIR-RAID SIREN WAILS

We're faking it, but Matthews insisted his result was genuine.

The secret theory that ultraviolet light could ionise air.

The beam creates a path of charged particles

capable of conducting electricity.

But the War Office suspected he used a hidden cable.

The military asked him to move the engine, didn't they?

That's right. But Matthews said no, he wasn't going to move it.

-I guess that would have made him look a bit dodgy.

-Yes, it would.

-Was he faking it?

-I don't think he was faking it at all.

It was new technology.

Matthews had spent weeks getting the ultraviolet light

focused really precisely onto this running engine.

Any movement in that would undermine the demonstration.

The hype surrounding Matthews rocketed

with the release of a film suggesting a huge death ray

could annihilate an entire city.

But, to the public's dismay, the War Office rejected it.

I've come to Cardiff University to see if they made the right decision.

So, Richard, do you think it's theoretically possible

that Grindell Matthews' death ray could have worked?

Certainly. In principle, it is possible to demonstrate.

In this lab, we have a high-voltage generator.

We can show air being ionised.

We can see electrical current passing through the air.

-Certainly, that aspect of his experiment is possible.

-Excellent.

-CRACK!

-BLEEP

You didn't warn me about that, mate!

Yes, I see your point.

It's perfectly possible, then,

to create a big, fat spark of ionised air

But is it possible to ionise air with light?

-That's the key to Grindell Matthews' machine, his death ray.

-Absolutely.

-I'll show you now.

-"Fire laser."

-There you go.

-Where?

That infinitesimally small pinprick?

That is ionised air that's being ionised by a big, fat laser somehow?

Absolutely. That's right.

For Grindell Matthews' machine to work, it would have to go

from the death ray all the way to the aeroplane?

Absolutely. Long way, a lot of power.

A heck of a lot of power.

For example, for five metres of air

you would need 1.4 million lasers of this sort of size.

To reach a plane, you'd need a laser the size of a small town.

The notion of using light as a weapon

was overtaken by other innovations

and the death ray never became a reality.

Matthews died in 1941.

His insistence on secrecy means we'll never know

whether he was a master showman or a visionary genius.

Amazing footage, there.

After his death ray flopped, Matthews spent the rest of his days

holed up in a fortified lair, high in the hills above Swansea.

We'll probably never know what he was up to

but the locals claim that when they drove past his lab, their cars mysteriously cut out.

Of course, that could have been caused by the damp - not that it ever rains in Wales!

We're almost at the end of the show now.

What better way to finish off than with a rousing singsong,

something we know we're good at!

Here is Gyles Brandreth

with the story of the great Welsh hymn tune Blaenwern

and its origins in industrial Swansea.

These days, Swansea's a leafy city, if a little rainy at times,

but back in the 19th century, the view was very different.

Standing here, you would have been faced with 300 chimneys

belching clouds of thick, orange smoke that blocked out the sun.

It was like a volcano erupting.

There were slag heaps and scorched earth

so poisoned by sulphur that nothing could grow.

Known as Copper Kingdom,

Swansea was the smelting capital of the world and workers flocked here.

It was said that if the devil had passed through,

he'd have thought he'd come home.

But amid this bleak landscape, something was blossoming.

Wales was caught in a wave of intense Christianity.

Alcohol was out, hymns were in and chapels were packed to the rafters.

The influx of workers boosted congregations so dramatically in this part of Swansea

that they built this!

The Morriston Tabernacle.

It was here, in 1904, that conductor William Penfro Rowlands

composed a Welsh hymn tune called Blaenwern.

It was written at a time when his son was ill.

His son had had pneumonia.

His son was sent to Pembrokeshire, to Blaenwern Farm near Tufton,

because the air was much cleaner in Pembrokeshire

than it was in smoky, sultry Morriston.

So he went to get away from the smelting and the fumes?

Exactly, yes.

To mark the fact that his son recovered from his illness,

Penfro Rowlands named the tune Blaenwern.

-Why does it have this extraordinary impact?

-I think it's so well-built.

It starts off quite modestly, quite low in the register, HE PLAYS THE ORGAN

but then, when you get to the middle, everything notches up.

It's far more emotional. There's more drive to it.

The harmony is higher, everything gets stronger.

It's a very dramatic, the way it moves forwards.

The last four lines are very, very full of emotion.

# Dim ond calon lan

# All ganu... #

So, a simple opening

-and then we build and build to this crescendo of emotion.

-Yes.

The religious revival isn't all that grew

in the grim, industrial conditions.

To escape the toil,

male voice choirs were formed

and the four-piece harmony of Blaenwern was perfect for them.

The furnaces had gone, but Blaenwern lived on.

Set to the English words of Methodist Charles Wesley,

it became Love Divine, All Loves Excelling,

sung here by the Morriston Orpheus Choir.

# Visit us with Thy salvation... #

It's wonderful that this great melody

comes from this harsh, industrial landscape.

Yes, but that was how people overcame the difficulties

of where they lived.

A lot of the male voice choir tradition was born

in industrial areas,

just to get out of the harsh climate that they worked in.

-It lifts the spirit.

-It does.

# Hwyl a bore fy nymuniad

# Esgyn ar adenydd can

# Ar i Dduw, er mwyn fy Ngheidwad

# Roddi i mi galon lan

# Calon lan yn llawn daioni

# Tecach yw na'r lili dlos

# Dim ond calon lan all ganu... #

Rowlands never got to see Blaenwern become as famous as it is today,

which is a shame, because I think he'd have been proud

to know that his beautiful hymn outlived the stinking factories

of the Copper Kingdom.

# Nos. #

What an ending. Fantastic stuff. Da iawn, boys.

Well, we've got to let the cleaners in now

so that's all we've got time for,

but don't despair because there are plenty more gems

waiting for you in episode two of Wales On The One Show.

Coming up next time... medieval mayhem.

Joe Crowley is catapulted back in time at Caerphilly.

Prepare to loose!

Loose!

-Huzzah!

-THEY CHEER.

Deadly deception.

Dan Snow's in Trealaw on the trail of a man who never was.

They created this completely false personality,

this person who'd never existed.

Who's the picture of?

The picture is of an MI5 officer

who just happened to look a bit like the dead man.

It's as Welsh as Tom Jones, so what will an Englishman make of laverbread?

Jay Rayner gets his first taste of Gower seaweed.

I must admit, I'm a little nervous,

because I have no idea whether I'm going to like it or not.

And half a century after the war ended,

Angellica Bell meets the Londoner

who's still being evacuated to Haverfordwest.

I still get butterflies when I come up here. It's like coming home.

Wow, that is going to be an amazing show.

Make sure you don't miss it.

I'm off to look for some faggots and peas somewhere in London.

Thanks so much for watching this special edition.

We really did enjoy putting it together.

That's it from Wales On The One Show.

Nos da. Goodbye.

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