Nothing is lost in translation in this alluring Welsh drama
The Red Sea continues to part for Keeping Faith (BBC One). The drama began its odyssey on S4C last November. As the Welsh-language channel enterprisingly did with Hinterland / Y Gwyll, a version in English was shot simultaneously and shown on BBC Wales in February. Thanks to viral word-of-mouth enthusiasm, it had its stint on BBC iplayer extended. And it has now landed on the big mainstream channel where those who missed out are heartily encouraged to give it a whirl.
Why? The premise of the thriller is simple enough. The happy Howells family is disturbed when husband and father Evan (Bradley Freegard) goes off to work one morning and simply vanishes. His wife Faith (Eve Myles), on maternity leave with their third child from the firm of solicitors where they both work, is puzzled, then angry, then suspicious and finally spooked as she discovers Evan has a secret identity.
The show’s virtues are many. The setting is a close-knit Carmarthenshire community called Abercorran, delectably played by Dylan Thomas’s Laugharne. The script by Matthew Hall is a teasing blend of wit and anxiety. The director Pip Broughton subtly picks out telling details from angles – low down, or overhead – that are eye-catching without feeling ostentatious. And the action is punctuated by a catchy score of woozy ambient crooning (composer: Laurence Love Greed).
But what makes Keeping Faith quite so gripping is Eve Myles. She is so very central to the drama’s moreish allure that the Welsh version missed a trick giving the show quite a dull title (Un Bore Mercher means “one Wednesday morning”). Myles has been around for years without quite catching the big breaks – she starred as a titular district nurse in Frankie on BBC One in 2013 but it was not recommissioned.
To land this role she learnt Welsh, which is no small undertaking. But what she also brings can’t be learned: gloopy pools for eyes, a sexy gaptoothed smile and a strong sense that the role of Faith fits her like a glove, right down to the fact that all of Faith’s smart clothes are slightly too small for her. Perhaps extra intensity derives from the fact that Freegard is Myles’s husband in real life too.
Llongyfarchion i bawb (as in congrats to all).
As Keeping Faith opened on BBC One, it formed a curious double bill with The Gameshow Serial Killer: Police Tapes (ITV), which was also set in the far south-west of Wales. In 1985, two siblings were shot and killed in Pembrokeshire. In 1989, a married couple suffered the same fate on the coastal path. No one was caught until, decades later, Dyfed-powys Police were able to bring forensic DNA techniques to bear.
The long and the short of it was that John Cooper, who had spent plenty of years behind bars for burglary and robbery, was eventually convicted after his release for these and other crimes. That was in 2011, so it wasn’t quite clear why seven years had elapsed until this documentary told of the police’s dogged efforts to reel in the culprit.
Cooper came by his moniker, “The Bullseye Killer”, because shortly before the second pair of murders he went on TV game show Bullseye and threw darts under the watchful eye of Jim Bowen. This would suggest a psychopathic gift for disconnecting. The likeable, down-to-earth detectives who conducted interviews with him talked up his penchant for mind games. From the evidence of the interview footage, these didn’t seem highly sophisticated. “You’re making things try to fit to John Cooper,” he said in the face of conclusive evidence, “and it’s bloody annoying.”
With his handlebar moustache, he came across as a common-or-garden thug with a ruthless streak. He even attempted to implicate his son, who remembered how his father “would lay into me like I was made of rubber and throw me around like I was a doll”. Criminals are much duller in real life than in drama. If a scriptwriter typed “I am not a murderer, I don’t care whether you believe it or not”, they’d soon see a blue pencil struck through it.
This appeared in something ITV are calling their Crime & Punishment strand. That ampersand renders the fist-bump to Dostoevsky just a little bit more dismal. Susanna Reid did the presenting, and leafed through documents as if somehow integral to the investigation. Detectives and forensic pathologists told their stories directly to camera, like public servants accounting for their actions. No one said “bullseye”.