Interview: Iona Jones

Iona Jones

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As S4C approaches its 25th birthday Broadcast reveals how the channel continues to provide a blueprint for PSB.

Ask the man or woman in the London media street what S4C is and they'll probably take a guess that it's Channel 4's Welsh outpost, possibly consisting of an office in Cardiff where they overdub C4 programmes in Welsh. S4C chief executive Iona Jones is politely frustrated by such misperceptions.

"It has been a very common perception," she says, "but I believe that is changing in places of influence."

About time too, you might think, given that the channel has been around for a quarter of a century. And if Jones has one message she wants to get over it's that S4C should be perceived as a public service broadcaster.  But, more than that, she thinks it's a model that other broadcasters might want to pay a bit more attention to.

"I think we're quite interesting in that debate over public service broadcasting," she says. "It may be that we have some answers to some questions that people are grappling with in relation to the BBC and what happens to the licence fee and how diversity could be funded.

"Why are people still talking in terms of the licence fee being used by others as a hypothetical question? It's happening in reality in S4C. We've actually gone through that process."

Jones points to the Strategic Partnership which guarantees £72m a year of programming to S4C from the BBC over the next three years, in effect a slice of the licence fee. Put that alongside the £94.4m of government money the channel will receive this year and the £5.4m coming from advertising and sponsorship and you have a thoroughly modern mixed-economy broadcaster.

If people really are starting to take more notice of S4C in this way it's probably down to two factors.  Firstly, the channel is, as Jones says, on the frontline of the digital revolution, going digital in 2009. Secondly, S4C's higher profile must also be due to its chief executive, who has earned a reputation as a deft political player.

"Broadcasting is a very political business," Jones says, "and because of my background in corporate stuff I rather like that, yeah I do."

Jones, 43, began her career as a journalist at BBC Wales, before becoming a director of corporate affairs, first at S4C and later at ITV Wales where she represented Carlton 's regional companies throughout the UK . She returned to S4C in 2003 as director of programmes before landing her current role.

"I never imagined myself doing this", she says. "Even though I'm known for my strategic thinking and planning and for working things out to try and be ahead of the game, I genuinely haven't applied that kind of approach to my own career. Opportunities came along and here I am. There's no master plan."

Part of the plan for S4C in appointing Jones was to raise the channel's profile and usher in a period of change. Because if people outside Wales have not known much about what S4C has been getting up to perhaps that isn't entirely down to the media world's London-centric short- sightedness. Jones admits that S4C and the whole Welsh broadcasting sector has been a bit inward-looking.

"In the past we would look at our immediate proposition in relation to Welsh speakers. What we've done internally and with our producers is to say we are part of something which is much bigger and we have to compare ourselves to the best, not just rely on having something that nobody else does."

Jones can, and does, point to growth in viewing figures and share since she took over, due in part to changes in programming. "We had a bit of an obsession with the past," she says, "period costume drama and factual programming looking at how things used to be. We've transformed all that to make it more current and relevant."

While still appealing to the Welsh-speaking audience, which makes up 21% of the population and, since compulsory teaching of Welsh in schools began in the 1990s, has actually been growing, Jones has been putting more emphasis on programming with more universal appeal.

But the changes haven't gone down well with everybody in the Welsh production sector. In 2005, S4C decided to divide a £1m development fund between just five key Welsh producers - Tinopolis, the Boomerang Group, Presentable, Green Bay and Cwmni Da. 

"They are the five we identified at that time as being very forward thinking and progressive," says Jones. "The others are becoming less of a feature of our commissions." While the other 25 or so independent producers in Wales are still able to pitch for commissions the message from S4C was clear that these five are the kind of companies that S4C wants to do business with.

It's been tough for a number of producers. S4C commissioned from 31 Welsh production companies in the past year, down from 46 companies five years ago, an indicator of the degree of consolidation that has affected the sector in that time. But it's been tough too for the channel, which now employs 168, down from a peak of 206 in 2003.

"There has been resistance to the change because it's been a very comfortable place for a long time," says Jones. "But my job is to make sure that the stability and sustainability of the channel is there and we don't rest on our laurels because we have rested on them too long."

Fact file
Born: 15 January 1964
School: Ysgol Gymraeg Bryntaf and Ysgol Gyfun Llanhari
University: Economic and social history at Exeter University; diploma in journalism at Cardiff University's Centre for Journalism Studies
First media job: Sub-editor, BBC Radio Cymru
Career high: Delivering two years' consecutive audience growth in peak at S4C
Career low: Nothing I'm prepared to admit to
Extravagance: Napery