Y Gwyll - Hinterland

A few years ago I went on a pilgrimage to Aberystwyth. It’s a bitter sweet story. When I was 12 or 13 on a family holiday to New Quay on Cardigan Bay one day it rained as only it can in West Wales. Fleeing from our caravan we ended up in Devils Bridge just in time to miss the last little steam train back to Aber on the delightful Vale of Rheidol Light Railway.

Forty years later I finally took that ride. Happily very little had changed a beautiful little steam loco took us up the valley we had lunch in the Hafod Arms Hotel looking like a piece of Switzerland and took in the punch bowl and the famous three bridges.

Not long after what should appear on our TV screens but Hinterland a new noir detective set of all places in and around Aberystwyth and where was the very first storyline to take us but up to Devils Bridge. Needless to say I was hooked. Today I have two main obsessions, the progress of Jeremy Corbyn and catching every episode of Hinterland or Y Gwyll to give it its Welsh title.

It is much more than your usual TV detective the whole world of West Wales is a key character. The place has this astonishing marginality that I find fascinating. Its Welsh title, Y Gwyll, means the dusk, between light and dark and across this landscape we see a whole society and economy teetering on the edge.

The cinematography is stunning never has decay and decline looked so beautiful, the acting too is outstanding, there is not a single character that is not fully rounded. The key partnership between Richard Harrington as DCI Tom Mathias and Mali Harries as DI Mared Rhys is also deeply enigmatic. Richard Harrington’s character is central to each episode but the acting too of Mali Harries is excellent.

Just what are they one to the other, well you will just have to watch and find out. I first discovered Y Gwyll in its English incarnation as Hinterland. Astonishingly it was filmed twice once in Welsh and once in English.

S4C the Welsh TV channel had been here before with A View to a Kill starring Philip Madoc as DCI Noel Bain, which ran for ten years from 1994 to 2004. I greatly enjoyed that show too my first introduction to a gritty view of South Wales.

Y Gwyll however elevates the detective genre to art it out noirs the Scandinavians and often uses silence and sparse dialogue to give us a huge sense of space. This is achieved without the usual patronising back fill and over explanation of much modern crime drama.

Contemporary crime drama can give us the reach of Dickens linking those from the very top of the pile to those at the very bottom along the way exposing the ugly greed, corruption and social dislocation of globalised capitalism. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the edge lands of Ceredigion so stunningly captured in Y Gwyll.

We often say that our crime genre is running to catch up with Scandy noir with offerings like Broadchurch but that is not the case with Y Gwyll, Ed Tomas, executive producer, of Cardiff based Fiction factory had pitched the idea years before the Scandy detectives reached our screens.  

The challenge for S4C was raising the cash to do the idea justice. Fortunately with some support from the Welsh Assembly they have pulled it off to the extent that the second series was bought by Danish television unseen.

Now I think you can tell there is something I find particularly satisfying about Y Gwyll and what is more despite only understanding the odd word I prefer it in Welsh to English. The sound and rhythm of the language adds another layer to the whole marginality of the drama.

Raymond Williams the great Welsh cultural theorist wrote one truly great novel called Border Country in it he explored the boundaries between England and Wales, town and country, classes, and the generations. Showing how culture and character was shaped by landscape.

The young protagonist on returning to the family home in Pandy not far from Abergavenny says that, “He had felt empty and tired, but the familiar shape of the valley and the mountains held and replaced him.  It was one thing to carry its image in his mind, as he did, everywhere, never a day passing but he closed his eyes and saw it again, his only landscape.  But it was different to stand and look at the reality.  It was not less beautiful; every detail of the land came up with its old excitement.  But it was not still as its image had been. It was no longer a landscape or a view, but a valley that people were using.”

That is what Y Gwyll does for the landscape of Ceredigion, it makes it not just a thing of beauty to look at but turns it into a landscape that is lived in capturing brilliantly along the way all the difficulties of life lived literally right on the edge.