It amuses me to see the extent to which YouTube provides videos of almost everything one could wish to watch, regardless of copyrights and other such concerns. Not everything is on there, of course, and just about everything that has a closely guarded copyright cycles around from profile to profile, so that while the video one was watching today may not be available in another month, a similar video will be available from someone else by then. The video quality sucks, but that's why it works best as a free site. Few would pay for the poorer quality and random gaps in available video sequences, without complaining enough to eat up all those fees in customer service expenditures.
Lately I have been on YouTube a lot, between watching the latest Doctor Who episodes over winter break- Yes, they aired on BBC America, but that is one of the few channels my local Comcast service won't offer except with a premium package, and I don't own a TV to watch the channels I do get. And, while BBC has streaming videos of these episodes online, they don't work from a US connection.- Anyway, I've watched all of David Tennant's Doctor Who episodes, now, and since then I decided I wanted to learn the Welsh national anthem. There are great videos for this on YouTube, including lots of lovely recordings of choirs and soloists singing it, and of course all sorts of other Welsh, Irish and Scottish music to intersperse with the many iterations of the Welsh anthem on my playlist. In putting together this playlist, I came across Ar Lan Y Mor, a popular love song in Welsh, and one I somewhat know the words to, from listening to Ioan Gruffudd reciting it in another video a while ago.
Ioan Gruffudd, a popular Welsh actor, who played a lead role in Fantastic Four, and was Horatio Hornblower in the A&E series, has had a less than pleasant relationship with his fanbase online. He seems to be a very private person, anyway, and when some fans said some inappropriate things about his wife, a very pretty American actress who's had the misfortune of being captured embarrassingly drunk in public a few times, Ioan reacted by pulling his support for his official fan site. This was years ago, and while I'd bet he has a much happier relationship with his local Welsh fans, he has yet to establish healthy US fan relations. Now that he and Alice have had their first child, he may not be inclined to bother with the international entertainment scene for a very long time. This all makes it less than hopeful that the video of him and Matthew Rhys on a beach, reciting A Lan Y Mor, is no longer on You Tube. It in fact disappeared at the same time as a few other videos of Ioan became unavailable, so while it may just be that the one user with this video dropped their account, I have to wonder. It was online for several years, and surely there would be extra copies around by now.
I'm sure, fans being what they are, eventually some copy of that clip will reappear. I think I am just finally growing accustomed to having everything I want available to me instantly. At least while I wait for that one video to come back, I can amuse myself with all the supercute Scottish-fold kitten videos and variations on the many national anthems of just about every nation in the British Isles and Europe. Spoiled? Never.
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