Franchise: Wales and the West of England
Companies: TWW, WWN note , ITSWW note , Harlech/HTV
Provides examples of:
- Blatant Lies: UNM bought a 20% stake in HTV, but said that they had no intention of buying the whole thing. That lasted about six months before they owned the company lock, stock and barrel.
- Britain Is Only London: Jokingly invoked in the narration when Harris talks about how bewildered the London media establishment of The '50s and Sixties was at the prospect of having to provide an independent television service for somewhere that wasn't England."How are good London folk supposed to work with these alien creatures?"
- Butt-Monkey: WWN/Teledu Cymru. It started off with a ridiculously underpopulated broadcast area, was contractually forced to produce impossible amounts of programming in English and Welsh, its transmitters failed throughout its first year and then it finally collapsed when Granada shut down its Welsh-language operations. Thankfully, TWW kept all of WWN's staff after its collapse, but just when everything seemed fine, TWW lost its licence.
- Credits Gag: The episode's end credits (and YouTube description) are written in Welsh.
- Hero of Another Story: The inception of S4C is briefly discussed in relation to how it impacted HTV.
- Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Granada likely had good intentions when dropping their Welsh-language content to bring viewers to the already troubled WWN (as their geographic areas overlapped), however, it ended up destroying them altogether.
- Network Sign Off: TWW's final broadcast was the first one in the UK to close down without playing the national anthem.
- Shout-Out:
- The episode is named after the traditional Welsh hymn, "Cwm Rhhonda", which is often referred to as "Bread of Heaven" in English.
- The episode opens with singing Max Boyce singing "Hymns and Arias" at the 1999 Rugby World Cup. The chorus heard in the clip itself references the traditional Welsh songs "Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau" and "Ar Hyd y Nos".
- TWW chairman Lord Derby’s insistence on basing the channel in London rather than the actual region they were broadcasting to was considered "as airtight as a Lord of the Rings figurine display case in an obese bearded man’s basement."
- "The North Remembers" is quoted when discussing the early days of ITV in North Wales specifically.
- "Yakety Sax" plays over Harris' (false) claim that "every day at 7:30 PM, [WWN] had to show a half-hour program that consisted of nothing but a still shot of the Prime Minister's face accompanied by stirring music."
- Art of Calvin is used when detailing TWW’s meltdown at losing their licence.
- Sir John Betjeman shows up on Come to an End to recite an elegy to TWW where he refers to the station as "Telewele", a reference to a Welsh-language children's programme of the same name on BBC Wales.
- Wynford Vaughan Thomas, Stanley Baker and Richard Burton are listed as some of Harlech's early backers.
- SuperTed and Fireman Sam are listed as part of S4C’s most prominent exports. Pobol y Cwm is also mentioned as one of the Welsh-language shows that
moved to S4C from BBC1 Wales and HTV.
- Sore Loser: Much like Southern Television before them, TWW essentially threw a temper tantrum upon losing their license, ceasing broadcast five months earlier than they were supposed to.
- The Stinger: Brief footage of an HTV closedown, spoken in both English and Welsh.
- Take That!: By the time Teledu Cymru was back up and running as part of TWW, things were going well in Wales partly because no one had heard of A.A. Gill yet. Gill was a critic for The Sunday Times who described the Welsh as "dark, ugly, pugnacious little trolls."
- We Hardly Knew Ye: The original WWN/Teledu Cymru lasted barely over a year before going bankrupt and being purchased by TWW. As expected, virtually zero footage or pictures exist of its broadcast as an independent station.
