Reviews

The closest I've got to Nordic Noir has been the raw and aching melancholy of Hinterland, the Welsh contribution to this particular televisual challenge.

After the bilingual BBC Wales version appeared on iPlayer I just binge watched the second series over the weekend. As has been widely reported, the series is shot in both the Welsh and English languages. Even though we don't learn too much of the professional career story of the central character of detective Tom Mathias, played by Richard Harrington, in this hybrid version he doesn't speak any Welsh but his colleagues do when he's not around and to members of the public. I'd have felt let down if it had all been English.

The light, the tone, and the landscape make it an unforgettable and distinctive visual spectacle, like absolutely nothing else on British TV. The understated brooding intensity of the characters hint at new layers of mystery and the bitter hurt of a hard life. The particular pain of Mathias as he battles demons and unbearable pressure make it a sometimes unsettling viewing experience, but his flaws are far outweighed by his powerful moral instincts and the sometimes extraordinary lengths he goes to in order to champion the bullied, the excluded and the victims.

Every character reveals more of themselves as the episodes roll on. The detectives Elis and Owens with their recent losses, community ties and hints at minor complications of growing up in the community you serve and protect offer more as we go on. And it is a drama about how police people proceed with life, not a police procedural drama. I don't think I've seen anyone being arrested, just questioned. Using the scarce time to get to the point of the drama, the conflict, the clash and the pressure points.

There are deficiencies. Anytime the police go to interview someone in a murder case, if the relative, neighbour, or witness, carries on insolently doing their work, they've usually got something to hide. It's something I first noticed in Broadchurch, but partly due to the prevalence of dirty industrial trades it's even more in your face in the harsh demanding terrain of west Wales.

Is there a more unhelpful chief of police than CS Prosser, the most senior copper in Aberystwyth? Embedded almost certainly corruptly in his community he offers no insights, just warnings. Everything is conditional, but what does he actually do except stare out of a window and narrow his eyes?

There's also a recurring character in the second series called Euan Thomas, who I have completely forgotten about. He was in the first episode, but I can't recall him. That can't be right. It's possibly a symptom of the tightness, the closeness of the whole enterprise that it is hung together by a master plan, it will come together again. But while this may stand the test of time and make for an impressive body of work to be consumed in one weekend, I'm going back more than a year and I'm too old and busy to retain detail.

But that's not vital, not really. This is an ambitious production made for the people of forgotten rural Wales. And it is the people and their stories who provide the living backdrop to Hinterland that make it so unique and special. Blokes struggling to keep a bus company going, boatbuilders, farmers, mechanics. Often working amidst struggle and grime with broken down machinery, cracked Windows and peeling paint. These are the people who are often invisible from literature and television, but here they are presented in a way that understands them, without patronising or by passing comment.

This is a brave and demanding piece of television that promises more and hints at a journey to a place you aren't really sure you want to go to.

No-one does TV drama like the BBC. The Americans do it very well, but not in the same way. But no-one gets it so annoyingly, irritating, piously and awkwardly wrong like the BBC either.

Let's get the good one out of the way first - the writing by Peter Bowker in The A Word is stunning. It brings to life the complexities of a family challenged by the sinking realism that their beautiful son has autism. The direction and photography and sense of place is spot on. Sometimes it's the little touches that make a difference. I'm sure a continuity anorak like me, but with more detailed knowledge of the English Lakes, will tell you what's wrong, but I liked the fact that they nip to Lancaster. You do, when you live up there. A lazier writer would have looked at a map and sent them to Penrith.

Apart from poor Joe, the 5 year old at the centre of the story, but always on the edge of it, the characters all drive you mad. Well, families do, don't they? Sometimes they work it out and sometimes they can't.

I hesitated before watching it, so I've binged on it this week. I don't need a TV drama to know what effect a child with profound special educational and emotional needs has on a family. It's uncomfortable, the shock, the stages of comprehension and the allowances you make are all there. But more than anything is the love, protective sometimes,irrational, confused and flawed, but real love. There are times I've hid behind the sofa in a way I haven't since Doctor Who, as there are reactions and emotions on display that ring too true. I read somewhere that it didn't speak a truth about one reviewer's autistic brother. Maybe so, but that's not the point. It didn't try to be the last word on autism any more than it is about the tensions of succession in family businesses.

The real skill is that actually, really, nothing much is happening. It's just the stuff of life. I don't crave realism - I'm addicted to the Walking Dead afterall - but this is where The A Word is bang on. I've sat at a bus stop in a rural Northern village with my schoolfriends and then watched a scene in The A Word and gone, yes, that works for me. I've seen teachers tip-toe around issues and I know how hard it is to fight for extra support. Yes, all good.

At the end of it all though it's the writing. You can create the most fantastic high concept of a story but without character you can believe in, then it's sunk.

As Catholics you sort of heave a sigh of predictable acceptance when a TV series focuses on a priest. It's usually only a matter of time before he gets outed as a kiddie fiddler. Dark as this series was though Sean Bean not only delivered a performance you could believe in, but depicted a priest that truly fulfils Pope Francis' call to them to get out and smell of the sheep. Tough storylines, full of despair, frustration and tension, but in doing so Jimmy McGovern also wrote a troubled love letter to the church. Full of contradictions, but full of the graces.

The best acting in any of these recent televisual tours Down Under has been from Rebecca Gibney as Lola in Wanted (Seven Network and Netflix). It's a woman-hunt road movie which jumps over to Thailand and New Zealand, as well as making great use of the expanses of South Australia's outback and Queensland. As well as being a tense and believable thriller it's also very warm and witty and tests your patience with complex characters.

Lenny James is a great talent and he has crafted some multi-dimensional non-cliched complex characters that seems utterly unique to other portrayals of how urban estate lives are portrayed on TV. Makes your teeth itch with discomfort, but utterly compelling. Even better than Save Me, Save Me Too is some of the best drama for years. I think it's the characters Lennie James has created. I said that after the first series, people who live on London estates don't tend to live normal lives in TV drama, they are either victims or perpetrators. And main characters seem to always live in large suburban (usually London) houses that you couldn't possibly afford on the jobs and salaries they do. But the acting was top class too, especially from Lennie James and Leslie Manville, as you'd expect, but also from Olive Gray as Grace.

Set in Canberra and set up as a House of Cards style conspiracy thriller, this jogs along nicely and takes some brave twists and turns with both geo-politics and casting a trans character. Anna Torv is a real star as journalist Harriet Dunkley, but some of the politicos are right out of The Thick of It with some very strange motivations of characters which seem a bit fanciful. But frankly I can believe anything these days.

Australia has the blessing of locations and landscapes that take your breath away, used to great effect by Ivan Sen, the director of the original feature film Mystery Road, and Rachel Perkins, the series director who made much of the setting in the far north of Western Australia. But as well as the landscapes this 6-part spin off from the film of the same delved right into the rural tensions between Aboriginal people and the anomie of young white kids in such isolated sparse locations in a hyper connected world. Something social media and organised drug gangs don't necessarily respect. Beyond the sparkling performances of the main cast however some of the acting is comically bad, something you suspect the writers and directors know. Subsequently a lot is asked of Aaron Pederson as lone operator detective Jay Swan and Judy Davis as the local law enforcement stalwart Emma James. A good story, well told, looking forward to more from this crop.

We've just finished ten episodes of the excellent Deutschland 86, the follow up to 2016's Cold War caper, Deutschland 83. Our hero Martin Rauch starts the series in exile in Angola, teaching German to kids, many of whom are displaced by a proxy war fought by Africans representing manipulative communist and western interests, until he is cornered back into action by his deplorable Aunt Lenora.

There are three great facets to the whole package; the acting, the script and the overall design. Because of the language (it's in German), and the subtitles, I think I study the faces more and the expressions, the upper body leakage. The writing and story structure expertly manages to weave in real events from 1986; Chernobyl, AIDS, the Berlin nightclub bombing and the US retaliation in the bombing of Libya. But it also catches the style of the era very effectively with Mad Men style graphic titles, a sharp eye for punk fashions, especially in West Berlin, as well as big shoulder pads; all of which is complemented by snappy soundtrack, bookended each episode by the English version of Major Tom by Peter Schilling. Poignantly, just a few days after Mark Hollis died, up popped Talk Talk's Such a Shame for the pivotal scene of one of the early African adventures.

This tale is darker, I'd say, than three years previous, where it bordered on Carry on Communism at times. The government of the DDR is even crueller and more corrupt than before. There's certainly no playing it for laughs in how the Stasi treat the Fischer family.

Cynicism abounds and no-one really tells the truth about what they really want and what their purpose is. Everyone's a bit mean, and dishonest at the same time. The ending seems at once both hopeless and desperately sad, the ever presence of a wall that divides families, a people, a country. The hope however is in how their lives play out in Deutschland 89.

We reflect in these troubled times about all the things we have to look forward to, all the times we can spend with people we're missing, places we can go, new joys we can experience. I'll be honest, a trip to north west Wales may well figure in those thoughts. The scenery, the cute railways, the open spaces. But this is not the Wales of Hidden, its dark noirish second season managing to be even more relentlessly bleak and hopeless than the first, which takes some doing given it pivoted around a lonely man who abducts, rapes and imprisons girls on his farm, with the encouragement of his mother.

And yet, it was a hugely compelling second run out. Without giving away the plot, or how it gets resolved, it doesn't have a happy ending. It simply can't - there are lives torn asunder, as you'd expect with an opening that lays it out from the start - retired teacher killed at home and nihilistic teenagers up to their necks in it. But it's never a 'whodunnit?' but a why dunnit?

Part of the mystery is in the lives of people who are abandoned and neglected. In different ways each character yearns to belong to something, or someone, while lamenting a dark sense of loss.

Wales has been blessed in so many different ways and these are exploited fully in the rich atmosphere that swirls all around each scene in Hidden, sometimes overdoing the long shots of the characters staring into the distance. The slate quarries, the forests and lakes, and the views of the Menai Straits over to Angelsey hang over the individual human tales of loss and sadness as a reminder that people can be capable of such collective mistakes and mishaps. Every single character seems to carry a heavy burden of grief, or are the victims of appalling circumstance - even the offers of something better get snuffed out - be it the stress of raising a newborn child when you have no time, a fishing trip, or that you don't get to go out for a drink with the person who you click with.

There is police procedure, but it doesn't get in the way. Neither do the police seem particularly under resourced to deal with a murder investigation in the way you depressingly see in some urban crime dramas. Though you wouldn't want to rely on the services of a duty solicitor in a Welsh police station if these lot are anything to go by.

The central character DCI Cadi John (played with an understated melancholy by the excellent Sian Reece-Williams) is not only by some distance the most competent police officer Wales has ever seen (see Hinterland and Keeping Faith and you'll see what I mean), but also hugely empathetic, caring and yet pulled in all directions. And in a refreshing break with TV norms her personal story never overplays its hand, or exacerbates professional tensions with fellow officers who all seem to work for one another.

The whole cast of Hidden pull it off with real style and raw emotion. But it is the young actors in particular who are exceptionally strong, especially in the final two episodes where they are called upon to let out their respective despair, cunning and anger (left to right). Remember these names: Steffan Cenydd, Annes Elwy and Sion Eifion, as Conor, Mia and Lee.

As I wrote in appreciation of Welsh noir after the second excellent series of Hinterland, Welsh TV has a great head start on the rest of the UK with a tradition of drama going back to the very beginnings of its own fourth channel S4C. With Hinterland, Keeping Faith, Bang and Requiem, there clearly are a pool of actors, daring script writers and a landscape, literally, to die for.

I tend to go down these cultural rabbit holes. After watching Severn Screen's second season of the excellent Hidden (Craith, in Welsh), I was drawn to this feature length 'horror' written a few years earlier by Ed Talfan, producer of Hinterland and Hidden, and a particularly gruesome historical horror film The Apostle from 2018.

The trailer suggested it was going to be a horror film, I think. The premise being that it starts with a lonely man tending to a run down farm, building a well. He's played by Mark Lewis Jones, a Welsh actor of some stature, who brought real presence recently to both his part as Steve Baldini in Keeping Faith and as Prince Charles' Welsh language tutor, Edward Millward in The Crown. There is a sense of foreboding and a tragic, hidden menace, but as the story goes on you're sure the gentle giant Lewis Jones' Stanley is just that, but that the young man and the woman he's pulled from a crashed car have something they're running from.

All of the spoken dialogue is in Welsh, but it's also sparse and packed full of non-verbal tension, with just the three actors, the couple played by Annes Elwy from Hidden, and Dyfan Dwyfor who stars in S4C's Bang, which is now on my list. Yet for all of the uncertain undercurrents of tragedy and loss, The Passing is a remarkably tender and reflective story. There are a couple of dark twists that I can't even begin to hint at, but by the end of it (and I'd worked it out), you realise it's a work of quiet allegorical genius. Like many of the other projects that Talfan and his cohort are creating, it's a body of work that not only tells the stories of the people of Wales, that lets the landscape play an important central part, but does so in knowing and critical solidarity. It's far more ambitious in that regard than just Scandi Noir, Welsh style, unless of course I'm missing something cultural there too.

Should I pay any attention to reviews on IMDb? I was surprised it wasn't higher rated, but those who just didn't get it seemed to really hate it. Yes, there are things that happen that are improbable, impossible, inexplicable. That's the point. All I'll say is this: Cofiwch Drywern. So if you know what that means, fine, if you don't, that's not fine and you probably ought to read more.

My fascination with Welsh Noir started with Hinterland, but has just gone to a new level with Bang.

Yes, I was drawn into the darkness of Hidden. Keeping Faith teetered just to the right side of preposterous, with overuse of pop video style lingering to music over the attractive female lead. Requiem was super creepy, folk horror. 35 Diwrnod is OK, but limited by its small budget and cast. Bang seemed to reconcile all of these shortcomings and make a powerful virtue of each one, with much use of a popular technique of location centred drama - long location shots, and very smart use of music.

Like I said when Hinterland broke through with its take on the Scandi noir set up - cop outsider with demons - the strongest cast member in a heck of a strong field was the landscape of Ceredigion, and the dark secrets of Aberystwyth. They also ended up smothering the plot and compensating for a drift into borderline cod. But like in Hidden, the stark survival of the Welsh working class was an ever present, if a little on the hopeless side.

Bang had all of this and more. The backdrop being Port Talbot, warts, beaches, steelworks, motorways and all. It didn't pull a single punch in the portrayal of the daily stuff of a police beat, following a spree of gun crimes in Series One and a savage killer on the loose in Series Two. But though life at times for a whole load of characters was unremittingly tough, it didn't seem as universally grim and hopeless as Hidden, or have the stolen idyll of Keeping Faith. Life is hard in this world of loan sharks, low wages, drugs, domestic violence,crime and decay. Yet for all that, there are characters who still bring warmth and joy, office banter and small tender moments of friendship and family life. Even poor old Sam Jenkins, bullied, friendless and prosecuted manages to have happiness and a sense of humour in his grasp. I say this having just wrapped up a stunning conclusion to the six part second run, which certainly didn't cue things up for happy ever afters.

There lingers too the possibility of justice not being served. It's possible that bullies, murderers and rapists might break an unwritten rule of TV drama and get away with it. Bang also has an earthier menace to it, man-made malignancy, rather than an ethereal lingering evil of the kind we saw so profoundly in Requiem, and hinted at from time to time in both Hidden and Hinterland, where there's always a hint of the weird and the eerie. Hopefully there are no spoilers here, and this is enough of a recommendation. Just watch it, absorb yourself in it and try not to have nightmares. The cast are (mostly) tight and the creator Roger Williams' script sparkles with bilingual delights. But in Catrin Stewart as Gina, and Jacob Ifan as Sam, you have two performances that would earn a BAFTA, or equivalent, in any language.

A final thought though, did nobody care what happened to creepy Russell?