S4C: The First 25 Years

Wednesday 1 August 2007
S4C: The First 25 Years
Key figures involved in setting up the world's first Welsh-language television channel will talk frankly about their roles in a major conference to mark S4C's 25th anniversary in November 2007.

The channel’s first Director of Programmes, Euryn Ogwen Williams, is one of the keynote speakers at the conference which is being organised by the Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies at the University of Wales Aberystwyth.

Mr Williams is expected to reveal for the first time how some of the crucial decisions shaping the future of S4C were taken in the run-up to the channel’s first broadcast on 1 November 1982.

He will be joined by former BBC Wales National Governor Alwyn Roberts, who played another defining role in establishing Wales’s fourth channel and who went on to become one of S4C’s first board members.

S4C’s current Chief Executive, Iona Jones, will be the guest of honour at the official conference dinner where she will outline her vision for the future of the channel in a converging world of digital media.

Other speakers include Rhys Evans, the biographer of the late Gwynfor Evans whose threat to go on hunger strike in 1980 led to the foundation of S4C two years later.

“S4C’s 25th anniversary is a major landmark in Welsh broadcasting history and this conference provides us with a unique opportunity to examine in detail some of the key decisions which have been taken during the past quarter of a century,” said Prof. Elan Closs Stephens of the University of Wales Aberystwyth, who chaired the S4C Authority from 1998-2006.

“The conference will bring together key players from the television industry as well as a range of academics from Wales and Europe. We hope to chronicle the first 25 years in the channel’s history and to explore specific themes such as the development of the independent television sector, linguistic policy and programming.”

The two-day conference will be held 2-3 November in the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth, which houses a huge catalogue of S4C’s output in its Screen and Sound Archive.

The conference will be officially launched at the National Eisteddfod of Wales on Wednesday 8 August.

Notes to Editors:
1.       News reporters and photographers are invited to attend the launch of the conference at 13:30 on Wednesday 8 August at the National Library of Wales stand on the Eisteddfod field.
2.       S4C first went on air at 18:00 on Monday 1 November 1982.
3.       The full title of the conference is ‘S4C: The First 25 Years’ (‘S4C – Y Chwarter Canrif Cyntaf’)
4.       The conference is being organised by the Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies in association with the Wales Institute for Cultural and Communication Industries and the Mercator Centre for Minority Languages at the University of Wales Aberystwyth, and the National Library of Wales.