Back in Wales and making a scene

`Here we are in the middle of the most extraordinary period of social and economic change for 200 years. We ought to be finding ways of dramatising how ordinary people are coping with the changes in their ordinary lives. But after the Thatcher-Tebbit axis the BBC lost its nerve. Our Friends In The North was the first drama for 15 years that looked at the world through working class characters."

Who says that - some subversive TV critic on a peripheral left-wing rag like Red Pepper?

No, Pedr James, one of the top talents in British television drama production, director of Martin Chuzzlewit and Our Friends in the North, of which he is rightly proud.

But James, so far from quitting the BBC's drama department in frustration as numerous others have done in recent years, is going to do his darnedest to bring more socially resonant dramas to our screens as head of drama at BBC Wales. Cardiff, with Glasgow and Belfast, is to become a key drama production base now that the BBC is sourcing a third of its network drama from the "national regions".

"Wales has so far failed to find its dramatic voice in the same way as Scotland, Ireland and the north of England have done," James says. "It's quite striking that in television drama a nation of great talkers and lyrical writers doesn't have its own Jimmy McGovern or Alan Bleasdale."

If anyone can change that state of affairs it is probably James. "One of the things that has distressed me as a practitioner over the past 15 years or so is the extent to which we have seen producers reach for detectives and dramas about the police," he says.

Partly he might be thinking of his own brief and unhappy experience on The Bill. He was hired to direct an episode and tried to build up one of the characters whom he found interesting. The producers told him he was forbidden to do so. No civilian on the programme could be more important than the police characters. James departed.

James couldn't be coming home to Wales at a better time. Culturally it is cool to be Welsh. No longer are networked programmes from BBC Wales confined to rugby coverage and The Cardiff Singer Of The World. In the next few months our screens will be awash with Welshness.

Already Friday nights see the series Visions Of Snowdonia and the drama serial Drovers' Gold. A soon-to-be-seen drama serial, Tiger Bay will show a gritty multi-ethnic community which, James says, will "contradict every Welsh cliche".

James is currently co-directing a TV film about Nye Bevan written and co-directed by Trevor Griffiths and starring Brian Cox.

And there's another Welsh drama he might do - his autobiography. "I am illegitimate. My real father left my mother when she was pregnant. She married a guy when I was four and he legally adopted me. My grandmother looked after me while my mother went out to work at a bakery." It seems she had considerable artistic skills and word of her cake decoration spread.

"People would come to our house and my mother would ice their wedding cakes. Our living room always had tiers of wedding cakes and that was my mother expiating her guilt of being unmarried and having a child."

James worked as an insurance clerk for five years before enrolling at Coleg Harlech in North Wales - "a sort of Welsh Ruskin College, providing a liberal education for 21- to 50-year-olds who show promise but have slipped through the educational net."

He then went on to become artistic director of the Merseyside Everyman Theatre and then into television.

James himself has a 16-year-old son by a friend since university days, to whom he remains devoted. "I was never married to his mother," he says, "so there is a sense of repetition of pattern." That is indeed a Welsh story, perhaps one worthy of the directorial attention of Pedr Jamesn