If you love Wales and you love sport and you love telly then there is nothing more pleasing than spending the dark, wet winter months in an edit suite bringing together all the very, very best bits from another wonderful year of Welsh sport. So making the Welsh Sports Review programme is always a pleasure.
We start the process by writing a giant list of all the major achievements by Welsh teams and athletes during 2015 and our researchers trawl the archives for all the best clips from the year. There’s plenty of choice – from the outtakes, to the controversies, as well as the funny social media clips like Ioan Gruffudd dancing in his pants or the starstruck Japanese fan meeting Shane Williams before the Wales v Uruguay game. The way people engage with sport through social media has become a big part of how we celebrate and the big sports moments and that’s something we really try to reflect throughout the programme.
Welsh dragon graffiti art used as a visual motif in the programme
We spend a week or two interviewing well-known Welsh sports fans, ex sports stars, sports broadcasters, and Welsh actors and comedians who love sport, and we ask them about the moments that made their hairs stand on end. Downton Abbey actor Tom Cullen itted to us he cried when Wales qualified for Euro 2016 and comedian Elis James said he took his top off and hugged a man he’d never met when Wales beat Cyprus!
The really tricky job for us is to edit 10 hours of content down to 59 minutes. We can’t fit everything in so there are some heated debates in the edit suite about what stays and what hits the cutting room floor. We then add in a bit of narration to help the programme flow and we work with some of the fabulous BBC Radio Wales commentary team, including the voice of football Rob Phillips and Mr Rugby himself, Gareth Charles. It gets us so pumped up in the edit suite listening to some of their amazing commentaries. The editor and I are always jumping around again, cheering and reliving the moment.
Gareth Bale Welsh graffiti art
The finished programme is a mixture of action, highlights, commentary, news clips, voice over and music, interspersed with comments from our celebrity contributors. We try and keep it pacey, action packed and full of humour. But there needs to be light and shade and we want it to be a real emotional rollercoaster, just like when you watch live sport with your mates.
This year we commissioned a Welsh graffiti artist to spray paint three big murals of Gareth Bale, a huge roaring dragon and a Rugby World Cup and we use them as a visual motif throughout the programme. After a month in edit we are ready to lay down the voice, take the programme to the dubbing experts, tweak the sound, pump up the volume and deliver the programme. We hope you enjoy it. We loved making it.
Welsh Sports Review 2015. Friday, December 18, BBC Two Wales, 9pm. #WelshSportsReview
