Keeping Faith -

BBC1

Welsh TV dramas are even rarer than Scottish ones, so I was delighted to see the return of Keeping Faith. I have to confess that I didn’t watch the entire first series. As a result I found it more than a little difficult to follow the plot. The flashbacks helped fill in the blanks, but I was still a bit confused. It didn’t help that we had no way of telling which scenes were present day and which were from the first series.

One minute, Faith (Eve Myles) is giving her husband, Evan, a Glasgow kiss and hammering the daylights out of him, the next she is visiting him in prison. Then

we’re back to the two of them – him wearing a hoodie, and with a severely damaged proboscis, discussing some crime that he has committed. He says he is going to hand himself in. Later we learn that he has embezzled some money.

Both Faith and Evan are lawyers, but Faith doesn’t think that Evan is up to the job. She seems to be involved in some pretty shady dealings herself. In one scene she hands over a wad of cash in return for an envelope. The guy who gives her the envelope says “You people make me sick!”

What does it all mean? Actually I don’t care. I just love watching Eve Myles strutting her stuff. She is an absolute tourde-force. Good acting is all about energy and Myles has it in spades. She lights up the screen with a performance that leaves the rest of the cast struggling along in her wake. Where has she been? If she doesn’t receive a best actress – sorry, best actor (gender equality, don’t you know) nomination at the next Baftas, there’s no justice.

Anyway, I’ll be glued to the screen for the rest of the series. Performers like Myles are just too good to miss.

Eve Myles stars as Faith Howells