Hinterland director: Welsh drama should be bilingual

We do like a bit of Hinterland on this site, but getting it on-screen is a tricky-old business. In fact, it’s an incredible process – Welsh-language versions are produced for S4C, and then it’s re-filmed for English-language markets, like the BBC and Netflix. It sounds like a big-old faff, but seems to make commercial sense, although the rise in Scandinavian and Nordic drama and our being fine with subtitles begs the question: why can’t we just watch stuff in Welsh? Now creator and director and Ed Thomas has had his say.

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Review: Y Gwyll (S3 E8/8), Sunday 18th December, S4C

Over the course of the past series and a bit, ever since Iwan Thomas re-emerged, we knew that the end to the Devil’s Bridge children’s home story would be coming. Even though this series has seen Mathias and Rhys investigate a new batch of crimes, the Devil’s Bridge thread had been bubbling away in the background, coming to the fore in last week’s episode. Now it was time to see how it ended.

NB: Sorry, should have said… spoilers!

Review: Hinterland/Y Gwyll (S2 E8/8), Sunday 31st October, S4C

Apologies for the late review of this, but it has been another busy week. There has been another reason for this lack of punctuality – I needed to digest this final episode of the series throughout the week, and watch it again. Why? Because things started to get a bit incomprehensible towards the dénouement. In fact, I’m still none the wiser.

Hinterland/Y Gwyll renewed for a third season

I’ve been enjoying the second series of Hinterland/Y Gwyll on S4C. It’s been rammed full of interesting stories featuring people who seemingly live in a bit of a time warp. When I interviewed showrunner Ed Thomas, he told me that he was hoping for some sort of Welsh Western feel, and that totally made sense – there’s an epic feel to the shots and craggy locations and people play out their feuds in front of tormented cop Tom Matthias and his excellent partner Mared Rhys. There’s good news today – the channel’s Welsh home, S4C, has announced that it’s to be renewed for a third series.

Review: Hinterland/Y Gwyll (S2 E7/8), Sunday 25th October, S4C

This second series of Hinterland/Y Gwyll has been of the highest quality, but now it’s time for the final two-part story of the series. In the last episode we saw the re-emergence of Iwan Thomas, a character who first appeared in the final episodes of the last series. He has some serious beef with Prosser, and everything pointed to something that the taciturn chief was covering up. But what? And what kind of gruesome case would Mathias and Rhys be thrust into this time?

Review: Hinterland/Y Gwyll (S2 E6/8), Sunday 18th October, S4C

Apologies for the lateness of this review – it has been a super-busy week and this is truly the first time I’ve been able to sit down, watch and review this episode of Hinterland/Y Gwyll. It was the second part of the story that started last week, which told how the discovery of a young woman’s body – later established as a Polish woman called Kasia – triggered a desperate search for Greta Pritchard, a primary school teacher, whose car the body was found in. The final scenes from the episode saw Greta’s father Gwilym pulled from a smoking barn after he tried to gas himself via the fumes of a tractor. Why did he do that? And where was his daughter?

Review: Hinterland/Y Gwyll (S2 E5/8), Sunday 11th October, S4C

After last week’s stunning two-part story I wondered where Hinterland/Y Gwyll would go. Where it could go. Those two episodes were of such a high standard (writing, acting, emotional clout) that it was difficult to how this series could be improved. It was no surprise, then, that this, the first of a new two-part story, was not quite up there to last week’s standard. But it still presented us with another intriguing case for Mathias and Rhys to get stuck into.

Review: HInterland/Y Gwyll (S2 E4/8), Sunday 4th October, S4C

As regular readers of this blog will know, I’ve been trying to follow the second series of Hinterland/Y Gwyll over on S4C and have been enjoying it. It’s not easy sledding – the Welsh-language drama is full of dramatic scenery, tortured characters and rural communities that have been worn down by life, uneasy at the way modernity is edging out the old ways. So far, so good, then, but this week’s episode – where we saw the conclusion of a story that started last week – rose things to new levels, providing the best hour of crime drama I’ve seen in a while.

Review: Hinterland/Y Gwyll (S2 E3/8), Sunday 27th September, S4C

Apologies this is a day late – it’s been quite a weekend, a weekend spent mostly at the Radio Times Festival. So this is the first time I’ve had a chance to sit down and savour the third episode of this second series of Hinterland/Y Gwyll. And savour is the right word because it’s slow-moving, intense stuff, with thoughtful, heartbreaking human stories set in foreboding, rugged rural communities. And this week – the start of a new two-part story (series two comprises four two-part stories) – was no different. 

Review: Hinterland/Y Gwyll (S2 E2/8), Sunday 20th September, S4C

It’s genuinely great to have this series back again. After a promising first run, it really feels like the characters are hitting their strides and the stories – stories of people struggling to make ends meet in the ultra-rural Ceredigion region in Wales – are being told with increasing assuredness. Last week we immersed ourselves in an emotional tale of a school bus driver selling drugs to sixth formers and university students, with the help of an ex-con who had previous when it came to drugs. One of the imbibers slipped into a coma and now suffers from permanent brain damage. We left Mathias and Rhys about to take in the lad’s father, who, its was implied, was the person who meted out revenge on the bus driver. Except it didn’t quite turn out like that.