Up My Street - "Coming Home": Janet Street-Porter, 7pm Tuesday 27 March 2007, BBC1 Wales


The outspoken star "Comes Home" to Wales to trace her roots

JANET Street-Porter's well known for her outspoken attacks on Wales, its people and language. All of which seem especially bitter as she hails from Llanfairfechan. But when the woman who declared that the Welsh language has "no words for anything invented after the Black Death" goes back to her roots, something remarkable happens.

Street-Porter is the latest celeb to feature in the series Coming Home which reunites people with their Welsh heritage.

And when she returns to the North Wales seaside town a lot becomes clear as she discovers her family's centuries-old roots in the area, and we discover the difficult time she had here.

"Every summer we would stay with my nain and outside her door would be a freshly made birch rod, she had made from twigs which she used to put the fear of God into us.

If we misbehaved we would get a whack from it," she recalls.

It didn't help that Street-Porter and her sister Pat didn't speak the same language as their gran.

"My mother grew up here and her first language was Welsh, why she didn't teach me and my sister God only knows, it would have made life so much easier for us."

As it is, the writer, broadcaster and friend of stars such as Liz Hurley knows only how to say Five Star Hotel and Double Espresso in her mother's tongue.

"I don't feel even remotely Welsh. When my mother died part of the funeral service was in Welsh and as far as my sister and I were concerned they could have been reading the Asda shopping list," she says. I also feel anger that I wasn't allowed to attend my grandmother's funeral because it was in Welsh in chapel. That makes me very sad because I did spend a lot of time with her."

A visit to the house her mother grew up in is a humbling experience.

The tiny two-bedroomed cottage is on the very outskirts of the village, set aside for the poorest.

Her grandparents and seven children lived in the house where two children died.

"You couldn't get further from the school. It's too depressing," says Street-Porter, visibly moved by the place. "I couldn't live in a place where two members of my family had died. No way could I have lived here."

She discovers how closely related she is to so many people from the area and how her family's connections to Llanfairfechan stretch back 300 years.

Even those who move away always return here and she is surprised to discover her nain was actually born in Cumberland.

"I've really enjoyed finding out about my family and their really close connection to Llanfairfechan," she admits.

"It explains why my mother would take me back there every holiday because it was a special place."


Source: 'TV Wales', Daily Post, Friday, 24 March 2007 [web site]