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Program Title
Credits Producer: Geraint Morris Director: Tristam Powell Intro SELECTED EXITS/Intro by Russell Baker Good evening. Tonight we start a new season on Masterpiece Theatre, with a new host. I'm Russell Baker. And more importantly, we begin by introducing a new writer - new at least to most Americans, since very little of his work has been published here. He is Gwyn Thomas, born in 1913 in the Rhondda Valley of South Wales, portrayed here, incidentally by another native of Wales, Sir Anthony Hopkins. Thomas wrote a dozen novels, several plays and a raft of short stories, but Selected Exits, which we dramatize tonight, is his memoir - not autobiography, but memoir - of growing up poor, and discovering a talent for writing, and about the people he met along the way. He was the youngest of twelve children born into a part of Wales where unemployment was practically a permanent condition of life. His mother died when he was six, and he was brought up by a sister, with occasional instruction from his father, a coal-miner who was usually out of work. Somewhere he describes his father teaching him to get rid of bill collectors - who were so plentiful at their house, he says, that it was like a training center for them. It must have been a good-humored house, I suspect, because Thomas had a wonderfully funny sense of humor and became a television celebrity in the 1960s. A critic called him The World's Greatest Talker, prompting Thomas to observe that talking on television was like having a conversation with a slow horse. He was intellectually precocious from the start - or tested well, as we say nowadays. In fact he tested so brilliantly that he was able to get out of Wales and go off to Oxford. Our story is about what happened to him between Oxford and the age of fifty - when he chucked a teaching career to become a freelance writer. Freelancing at fifty...what courage. Extro SELECTED EXITS/Extro by Russell Baker Gwyn Thomas died in 1981, at age 67, after living fifteen years with a seriously debilitating case of diabetes. He never really left Wales. A brief vacation - a few days in London for work - then back he always went to the Rhondda Valley. You might have guessed from those closing lines of his tonight that he was not a man to give up home for the high life. The Welsh, like the Irish, are Celtic people...and as the Irish are said to have the gift of words, the Welsh are said to have the gift of music. Welsh choral singing is famous around the Western world, but the Welsh also have a gift for making music of words. If you read a little Gwyn Thomas you'll find that he can make music of English prose. The Welshman Dylan Thomas - no relation to Gwyn - did it with his verse, perhaps the most musical poetry since Edgar Allan Poe's. Richard Burton, famous for Shakespeare before he became famous for Elizabeth Taylor, could make music with his speech, and did it so well that in Camelot they didn't ask him to sing his songs, but only to speak them. Those of us who heard him do it can still hear those songs in our head. I was going to tell you something about socialism in Wales, the poverty of the 1920s and ‘30s, and try to explain Thomas' contempt for Winston Churchill and the high-toned Englishmen he met at Oxford, but we are here to celebrate the discovery that a fine writer has lived and died among us, almost unnoticed. Ending with a history lecture would be like throwing an iron wreath on his grave. So let's not. Let's let the evening remain Gwyn Thomas's, and leave Owen Glendower, Winston Churchill and all that for another time. For Masterpiece Theatre, I'm Russell Baker. Goodnight.
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