A crime drama like no other
Welsh TV series ‘Keeping Faith’ has broken records on BBC iplayer. Tristram Fane Saunders explains the secret of its unlikely success
Its plot unfurls at a leisurely pace, its protagonist is a perfectly well-adjusted mother-of-three and it is set in a small town in Wales. But, despite breaking all the so-called rules of modern TV thrillers, Keeping Faith, a low-key drama about a lawyer whose husband goes missing on his way to work, is turning out to be one of the year’s most unlikely sensations.
Initially broadcast in Welsh on S4C last November, and then again in English on BBC Wales in February, the unflashy, slow-boil series has become a huge hit on the BBC iplayer, where it has so far been streamed a record-breaking eight million times.
It has been heralded as a homegrown answer to Nordic noir, but the real reason Keeping Faith has struck a chord with viewers is that it’s so quintessentially Welsh. The show’s aesthetic has less in common with Scandinavian miserabilism than with
cheap-as-chips soap Pobol y Cwm, with its bright colour palette and bustling sense of local community. Evan Howells, the husband of Faith, goes missing on a Wednesday morning, by the evening everyone knows, and half the town have invited themselves into Faith’s living-room.
From The Bridge’s Saga Norén to The Killing’s Sarah Lund, the Nordic noir protagonist is an emotional vacuum, unable to connect with other people. But Faith (played brilliantly by Eve Myles) is not like this at all. “Women in the midst of motherhood aren’t seen as sexy or interesting enough to play lead roles,” says the show’s director, Pip Broughton: “Faith has bust that myth.” Myles was herself heavily pregnant, and considering quitting acting entirely to retrain as a midwife, when Broughton offered her the role. The show’s close focus on Faith’s family dynamic has perhaps allowed it to fill a gap ignored by other TV mysteries.
What makes the show distinctive is its refusal to ratchet up the tension. When Evan fails to turn up to the law firm they run together, Faith reacts exactly as you would – with annoyance, not panic. “Should I be worried?” she asks her best mate, only half-serious, over a glass of wine. Compared to the melodrama of rival thrillers such as
Doctor Foster, it’s a very slow build-up, but Myles’s grounded performance gives the show an it-could-happento-you frisson, aided by her natural chemistry with her real-life husband Bradley Freegard, who plays Evan. The brightly lit sets and decidedly unthreatening soundtrack (from indie star Amy Wadge, who has co-written several of Ed Sheeran’s hits) keep reassuring us that we’re still in safe, familiar territory. As a result, when Faith finds a wig and fake ID in her husband’s wardrobe, and begins to uncover the (fictional) town of Abercorran’s dark underbelly, it’s as if an episode of The Archers has been hijacked by the writers of Twin Peaks.
One interesting quirk is that Welshspeaking viewers are watching a different programme. Every scene was recorded twice, in both Welsh and English (Myles learnt Welsh especially for the role). The Welsh version has become the first S4C show to really pierce the national consciousness since, erm, Eighties cartoon Superted. Meanwhile, the English-language version was the most-watched show on BBC Wales for 20 years, although that audience was dwarfed by its much larger audience in the rest of the UK.
Annoyingly, it comes off BBC iplayer on Friday and the BBC haven’t confirmed any plans to make it available again. But a second series has been commissioned. S4C’S chief executive Huw Jones attributed its popularity to “Welsh exiles”, but it could also be a sign of a growing appetite for Welsh fare. BBC One’s gothic chiller Requiem, steeped in rural Welsh folklore, was widely proclaimed the scariest show of the year, while a production of Under Milk Wood (also starring Myles) that aired on S4C in 2014 was later released in cinemas across the UK, and became a contender for the Best Foreign Film Oscar.
Crime drama Hinterland, another S4C/BBC Wales production, was scooped up by Netflix and became an international hit in 2014. It aped the tropes of Scandi-noir, complete with glum and isolated detective, and in a brilliant example of selling coals to Newcastle, the rights to air the show in Denmark were bought by DR, the broadcaster behind The Killing.
But Hinterland didn’t make quite the same splash as Keeping Faith, perhaps because it saw nothing silly about setting a gritty drama in Aberystwyth, even though the comic novelist Malcolm Pryce has spent his career mocking that very idea in his popular
Aberystwyth Mon Amour series. Keeping Faith plays up to that very oddness. As Faith’s daughter complains, “People don’t just disappear.” They certainly don’t disappear in a sunny daytime TV town like Abercorran. So when someone does, we’re hooked.
Keeping Faith is available on BBC iplayer until 10pm Friday
‘Women in the midst of motherhood aren’t seen as sexy enough to play lead roles. Faith bust that myth’