No London bigwigs, please, we're Celtic

From a Velvet Underground bass player to a discussion of Greg Dyke in Gaelic, there is cultural eclecticism and a few linguistic militants at the Celtic Film and Television Festival

The Celtic Film and Television Festival may have been going for 21 years, but that didn't stop the organisers of this year's gathering at Aberystwyth inquiring in the final session: "Who are we? Did the Celts ever exist?" Among those supplying answers were two of the writers who have done most in recent times to enrich the answer to those questions, the historian Norman Davies and Simon James, the author of Atlantic Celts.

Davies' book The Isles, which argues that "the coming crisis in the British state may well be its last", has been attacked as pro-Celtic, pro-Catholic and pro-Continent, not to say anti-English. It is dedicated to the author's father: "English by birth, Welsh by conviction, Lancastrian by choice, British by chance."

As a half-way Lancastrian émigré to west Wales myself, I am a sucker for this rather eclectic view of identity, which perhaps explains why, just before I left Aberystwyth, I couldn't resist sneaking into the National Library for an unofficial preview of the Pennal Letter. This is the note written by Owain Glyndwr in 1406 to King Charles VI of France, asking for assistance with Glyndwr's doomed attempt to establish himself as a Welsh Prince of Wales. It has just arrived in Wales on six-month loan from the French national archive.

For anyone or anything to arrive in Aberystwyth is itself an accomplishment. The train journey from London takes five hours, and from the land of the northern Celts, say, the Chancellor's constituency in Dunfermline, between eight and nine. The rolling stock rattles and sways like a roller coaster.

I decided to drive from London, leaving at 9pm, fresh from the Moral Maze, so with no chance of catching the festival's opening event, a performance by John Cale, the former Velvet Underground man who seems to be spending more and more time working in his home country.

My hostess at the Nanteos Mansion advises that at such a time of day, the journey can be done in four hours, and I am strangely keen to meet the challenge, regardless of the consequences.

The house is worth the rush: a vast, ghostly Georgian affair, where at 1.30am I am met by one of the investors in its restoration. He is entertaining a small group in the bar with outlandish tales of his former life in Kenya.

As the stories flow about riotous binges in Nairobi, I am reminded yet again how easily Wales fools hasty visitors with its prim, keeping-up-appearances exterior. In truth, its western fringe is frontier country, where some pubs never close and where England is a faraway country of which little is known. Whenever I see the raggle-taggle local hunt assembling in my own bit of Pembrokeshire, I feel a certain reassurance that no legislative writ from Westminster will ever affect its activities.

The idea of this festival is to celebrate the cultural achievements of those whose centre is not Anglo, though the closest thing they have to a common language is English. There are Bretons, as well as Scots, Irish and Welsh.

Almost 500 people have turned up to the Aberystwyth University Arts Centre, a recently extended structure with a conscious touch of Frank Lloyd Wright (another local boy). It has a theatre, a cinema, a couple of galleries and wonderful amount of airy, strolling space. Not bad for a town of 15,000 people.

There are the usual surfeit of prizes, which seem stronger on cultural evocation and gritty realism than on, say, comedy. The Welsh contingent, which accounts for very nearly half those present, have learned to expect to be out-gunned by the Irish and the Scots on these occasions, but today there's an air of expectation, based on the success of films like Solomon and Gaenor, an Oscar nominee, and the latest S4C-backed animation epic, The Miracle Maker, which has just gone on general cinematic release.

When it comes to the politics of culture, however, you can't escape the English. Sitting over a coffee when I first arrive, two neighbours are speaking in Irish Gaelic. The only words I can understand are "John Birt" and "Greg Dyke".

For the Welsh, the big political moment of the festival is a speech by Ron Davies, who lost his Westminster crown on Clapham Common, but who still occupies a place of some importance in the Welsh political scene, however much his enemies inside the Labour Party may whisper that he's a traitor.

Outsiders are merely mystified that a man so humiliated in the tabloids can still be so active in public life. This is partly because the Welsh media openly scorned much of what the News of the World had to say on the subject of Mr Davies's misdemeanours. But the larger reason is that Mr Davies occupies a position on that crucial piece of political ground shared by the outward-looking element in Plaid Cymru and modernisers in Welsh Labour (its official label now, New Labour having been formally declared a non-event in Wales) who wish to shed the Tafia image.

Mr Davies once spent a summer in Aberystwyth, learning Welsh and making friends. He knows that Aberystwyth was the right place to demand that Rhodri Morgan, the National Assembly First Secretary, create a new post of a Culture Secretary when he gets round to shuffling the Cabinet he inherited from Alun Michael. Mr Morgan himself was detained in Cardiff during the festival, stuck with the second-rank task of entertaining the Prime Minister.

No prizes for guessing who Ron Davies thinks should occupy the role of cultural supremo. He tried and failed to become the chairman of Sgrin, the Welsh film agency, a few months ago. At the festival, he's anything but the militant Celt, arguing that Welsh broadcasting should continue to be regulated from London.

Mr Davies is still the living embodiment of the hair's breadth margin of the Yes vote in the devolution referendum. By the evidence of this festival, this measured, internationalist mood is widespread among the new Celts - not so much Celtic Tigers as Celtic Dolphins. For the most part, the big-wigs in from London, John Willis of United Broadcasting and Sir Robin Biggam, the chairman of the Independent Television Commission, get a pretty easy ride, given that the pending United and Carlton merger promises to up end the Welsh broadcasting settlement yet again - and has already led to what one independence producer calls "an air of neglect" at HTV Wales, which United owns. But there's not much sign of that "Wales for the Welsh" or "Scotland for the Scots" rhetoric which these sorts of events used to serve with the whisky, though the SNP man did demand devolution of broadcasting regulation for Scotland.

In one session, a group of television people ask each other whether overt Celtic branding - stone crosses, Gaelic lettering and the like - helps to sell programmes to audiences. No one thinks that it does. RTE, the Irish broadcaster's second channel has ditched mossy stones for cyber-men bursting through the crust of the Emerald Isle and even TG4, the recently re-branded Irish language channel, has gone global new age in its messages.

This is bad news for linguistic militants, some of whom are feeling rather sore. Networks like TG4 and, in Wales, S4C refuse to eliminate English from their output. S4C says it would even consider a commercial English-language service in some part of its digital spectrum, if the right proposition came along. Is this a sign of weakness or strength? Without doubt the latter. As the last two censuses have shown, Welsh is no longer a language in decline.

Professor David Cristol of the University of Wales delivered a mesmerising lecture in which he explained why one of the world's 6,000 languages is dying every fortnight. Professor Cristol, a bearded, prophetic figure, argues that these languages, each the unique key to a particular human culture and history, are as precious as endangered animal and plant species. He reckons it would only cost £300m to pay for the linguists and tape-recorders to ensure that these languages are at least recorded.

By such measures, none of the Celtic languages spoken at this festival is under threat. Which, if you share Dr Johnson's view that language is the pedigree of nations, is a very good thing. Or, to answer the festival organisers' question: whether the Celts existed then, they're certainly in evidence now.

Ian Hargreaves is professor of journalism at Cardiff University