Hinterland / Y Gwyll
Jan. 5th, 2014 07:07 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
llywelaA belated happy new year to all my flisties and friends - blwyddyn newydd dda!
Last night I caught the first episode of the new BBC Wales police noir drama Hinterland - which already aired on S4C in its Welsh language version, Y Gwyll (The Wild). So good they made it twice, you see, which it has in common with the Philip Madoc detective drama A Mind to Kill back in 1994. Hinterland is set in the wilds of Ceredigion in West Wales and belongs to the same genre family as Broadchurch, The Fall and The Killing, sullen and brooding and atmospheric. In fact, the Danish TV network DR, which made The Killing, bought Hinterland's international rights before it was even filmed, in English or in Welsh.
Hinterland sees new-in-town DCI Tom Mathias investigating murders with his team consisting of DI Mared Rhys, DC Lloyd Ellis and DS Sian Owens, supervised by a rather meddlesome Chief Supt Bran Prosser. The focus so far is on the investigations, rather than on the personal lives of the officers, but already after episode one there's a reasonably good sense of who these people are and some excellent performances by the actors - and while Alec Hardy took 8 episodes to solve a single murder in Broadchurch, Mathias and his team wrapped up their first murder inside 90 minutes here! The inaugural case was intriguing, really sucking me in to the mystery and the mood, and the characters all felt like real people, living real lives and working real jobs. I didn't see Y Gwyll (I wish I had now) to know how that version dealt with language (100% Welsh or bits of English here and there? I suspect the former), but Hinterland is very much a bilingual drama representing a bilingual community. Central character Tom Mathias is English speaking, and the bulk of the action revolves around him - moody and intense with the best of 'em, and nicely played by Richard Harrington - but his right-hand woman Mared Rhys (Mali Harries) is a Welsh speaker and so are most of the team and much of the community they work in, so although the bulk of the dialogue is spoken in English, Welsh speaking characters speak (subtitled) Welsh to each other, only switching to English when an English speaking character joins their conversation, which is a very real reflection of how language works in the bilingual heart of Wales where the show is set, allowing the writers to play with the way true bilingual people drop back and fore between languages almost without noticing they are doing it, sometimes within the same sentence.
And then there's the landscape, which is wild and beautiful in that part of the country, shown off to great effect here. The show is set in and around the seaside town of Aberystwyth, which I know well, and seeing it up there on screen made me realise how long it's been since I visited and how much I miss it - and I was feeling wistful and nostalgic for Aberystwyth anyway after seeing on the news how badly the seafront was torn up by the storms this last week. Watching the show, I found myself longing to visit the village of Devil's Bridge to see that gorgeous waterfall for myself (hopefully sans corpses) - and it's worth observing that the legends mentioned by Mared Rhys are very real, allowing insight into Welsh culture and mythology.
The Guardian has a good write-up of the show here, published way back last summer when Y Gwyll was about to air, while Wales Online has a review of Hinterland's English language debut here.
All in all, I really enjoyed this first episode, and am now looking forward to the next - which apparently won't be till Monday 13th January, for whatever reason.
Last night I caught the first episode of the new BBC Wales police noir drama Hinterland - which already aired on S4C in its Welsh language version, Y Gwyll (The Wild). So good they made it twice, you see, which it has in common with the Philip Madoc detective drama A Mind to Kill back in 1994. Hinterland is set in the wilds of Ceredigion in West Wales and belongs to the same genre family as Broadchurch, The Fall and The Killing, sullen and brooding and atmospheric. In fact, the Danish TV network DR, which made The Killing, bought Hinterland's international rights before it was even filmed, in English or in Welsh.
Hinterland sees new-in-town DCI Tom Mathias investigating murders with his team consisting of DI Mared Rhys, DC Lloyd Ellis and DS Sian Owens, supervised by a rather meddlesome Chief Supt Bran Prosser. The focus so far is on the investigations, rather than on the personal lives of the officers, but already after episode one there's a reasonably good sense of who these people are and some excellent performances by the actors - and while Alec Hardy took 8 episodes to solve a single murder in Broadchurch, Mathias and his team wrapped up their first murder inside 90 minutes here! The inaugural case was intriguing, really sucking me in to the mystery and the mood, and the characters all felt like real people, living real lives and working real jobs. I didn't see Y Gwyll (I wish I had now) to know how that version dealt with language (100% Welsh or bits of English here and there? I suspect the former), but Hinterland is very much a bilingual drama representing a bilingual community. Central character Tom Mathias is English speaking, and the bulk of the action revolves around him - moody and intense with the best of 'em, and nicely played by Richard Harrington - but his right-hand woman Mared Rhys (Mali Harries) is a Welsh speaker and so are most of the team and much of the community they work in, so although the bulk of the dialogue is spoken in English, Welsh speaking characters speak (subtitled) Welsh to each other, only switching to English when an English speaking character joins their conversation, which is a very real reflection of how language works in the bilingual heart of Wales where the show is set, allowing the writers to play with the way true bilingual people drop back and fore between languages almost without noticing they are doing it, sometimes within the same sentence.
And then there's the landscape, which is wild and beautiful in that part of the country, shown off to great effect here. The show is set in and around the seaside town of Aberystwyth, which I know well, and seeing it up there on screen made me realise how long it's been since I visited and how much I miss it - and I was feeling wistful and nostalgic for Aberystwyth anyway after seeing on the news how badly the seafront was torn up by the storms this last week. Watching the show, I found myself longing to visit the village of Devil's Bridge to see that gorgeous waterfall for myself (hopefully sans corpses) - and it's worth observing that the legends mentioned by Mared Rhys are very real, allowing insight into Welsh culture and mythology.
The Guardian has a good write-up of the show here, published way back last summer when Y Gwyll was about to air, while Wales Online has a review of Hinterland's English language debut here.
All in all, I really enjoyed this first episode, and am now looking forward to the next - which apparently won't be till Monday 13th January, for whatever reason.
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no subject
Date: 2014-01-05 10:58 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-01-05 05:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-01-05 12:20 pm (UTC)And - happy new year, to you too!
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Date: 2014-01-05 05:41 pm (UTC)