William Jones (1953–2009)
In February this year William Jones died. He was one of Wales’s foremost scriptwriters and was known to all as Wil Sir Fon (literally Anglesey Wil, after the Welsh custom of replacing a too-common surname with a place of origin).
Wil joined the BBC Drama department in Cardiff in 1973, recruited from college by the Head of Drama, John Hefin and thereafter mentored by Gwenlyn Parry, the renowned playwright and bon viveur who was the Head of Scripts throughout the seventies and eighties.
Over the years Wil became the creative dynamo at the heart of the BBC’s longest running drama serial, the Welsh soap Pobol y Cwm. He was the main storyliner and script editor on the series for two decades, as well as being one of its regular writers until shortly before his death. He is survived by his widow Carolyn and daughter Rhiannon.
His funeral was attended by hundreds of colleagues, in the main actors and writers who had worked and socialised with him over the years.
One of the colleagues who knew him best and worked closest with him was Rob Gittins, now best known as a regular writer on EastEnders and other series. This is an excerpt from his tribute to Wil:
I first met Wil 31 years ago. Over those years we were to spend thousands and thousands of hours together, in offices, in cars, on trains, on ferries, on planes. We probably spent more time together – family excepted – than with anyone else. And what we did for those thousands and thousands of hours was to talk, almost exclusively, about people who didn’t exist. We talked about lives that weren’t really being lived. We made up stories.
Wil made up characters. He made them live imaginary lives. He put them through imaginary tests, made them fight imaginary battles. It seems almost childlike, not quite the preserve of adults, of grown men.
There’s a good reason why, from the earliest age, we devour stories. Why we revere storytellers, those people who have the talent, the imagination and the craft to take us into different worlds. The best of them – and Wil was among the best of the very best - let us live lives we’ll never know. They take us into battles we’ll never fight. They paint pictures of the lives we might have had, the choices we might have made. And we then take that back into our world. Play out our choices. Fight our battles. Learn from the storyteller’s imaginary tests. And, this being Wil, the stories he gave us were often wild and wacky, occasionally and gloriously over the top, crazy flights of fancy.
Wil worked on many dramas but the series most associated with him, I guess, is Pobol Y Cwm, a series reborn under Wil. Wil didn’t, of course, single-handedly bring Pobol into the modern world, into its present day five-day-a-week incarnation, but Wil was the single, most vital, most important part in that whole process. Wil laid down the stories, the bedrock, the foundation without which nothing else would have survived. Other people certainly made it possible – logistically – to watch this extraordinary new series. Wil made you want to watch it.
One image sticks in my mind. We were driving to catch a ferry to Ireland. We were about to begin writing the stories for a new series that Wil had dreamed up, that was going to be set both in Wales and Ireland and on the ferry that connected the two. And Wil started talking - about being a small boy on Anglesey – watching – from his bedroom window – the large ferries approaching the port, standing on the quayside, watching all those hundreds of people coming ashore. And while the rest of us might have looked at that scene and thought of escape, travel, Wil was wondering. What was that person coming to, what was that person running from? What hopes, dreams – stories – were there on that quayside rushing towards him, moving past him. The storyteller was already at work.
For some reason I can’t get that image out of my head and haven’t been able to ever since I spoke to Carolyn when she told the news of Wil’s passing – the small boy on a quayside looking at the world before him and letting his imagination take flight.
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