Three months after the BBC’s first transmission from London, public service broadcasting in Wales began at 5.00pm on February 13 1923. The small studio above a cinema in the centre of Cardiff also served audiences in the west of England. This may explain the very limited amount of Welsh language material broadcast at the outset.
To ensure the British Broadcasting Company, as it was then known, was in no doubt about the existence of the native language and culture of Wales, Cylch Dewi (a group of cultural nationalists) arranged the first wireless broadcast of a Welsh-language religious service from Swansea on February 22 1925. By the mid-1920s, they were producing programmes of their own for the BBC, following consultations with E.R. Appleton, Cardiff’s station director.
Concerns about the effect of the wireless on life in Wales, however, were widespread in the early years of broadcasting. In 1927, a report commissioned by the Welsh Board of Education, entitled Welsh in Education and Life, was published. It contained a damning attack on the BBC:
