Life beyond the Hinterland

It marked the emergence of Welsh-language drama on the international stage, but what came next for the makers of Y Gwyll (Hinterland)? DQ speaks to Ed Thomas, Ed Talfan and Gethin Scourfield about their latest projects.

By the time Welsh-language drama Y Gwyll (Hinterland) arrived on BBC Four in 2014, the channel was fast becoming known as a home for non-English-language drama in its prized Saturday night slot.

BBC Four’s reputation had been built on the back of acquisitions such as gritty French crime drama Engrenages (Spiral) in 2006, which paved the way for Swedish detective series Wallander (leading to a Kenneth Branagh-led British remake) and seminal Danish crime drama Forbrydelsen (The Killing). Swedish/Danish crime drama Bron/Broen soon followed alongside the likes of Italy’s Inspector Montalbano.

But Hinterland’s debut on the channel was part of a remarkable journey for a series that had first aired in October 2013 on Welsh-language broadcaster S4C. A bilingual version was then picked up by BBC Wales in January 2014 and, buoyed by critical acclaim and strong viewing figures, it was promoted to UK-wide channel BBC Four that April.

The series proved to be popular outside the UK too, with distributor All3Media International selling it to Netflix, ARD (Germany), KRO (the Netherlands), NRK (Norway), YLE (Finland), VRT (Belgium), RTV (Slovenia) and DR (Denmark).

Set in Aberystwyth, the police procedural followed DCI Thom Mathias (Richard Harrington), who leaves London for a new life, only to be immediately called to the scene of a brutal attack – but one without a victim. When the body of Helen Jenkins is eventually discovered, Mathias must unlock the secrets of a children’s home Helen ran for many years in order to find the murderer.

Hinterland ran for three seasons, but for three of the creative team behind the series – Ed Thomas, Ed Talfan and Gethin Scourfield – the story doesn’t end there. Each has built upon the success of that show by continuing to champion and produce Welsh-language and Welsh-made drama both locally and internationally.

Talfan, who co-created Hinterland with Thomas, wrote, directed and produced on the series while building his own production label, Severn Screen. He went on to make films such as The Passing and Apostle, before setting up another crime drama, Craith (Hidden). In the show, Siân Reese-Williams plays DCI Cadi John, a police officer who is drawn back to her childhood home but soon finds herself pulled into a sinister plot involving the abduction of several women when the body of one local woman is found in a remote mountain river.

While Hinterland and Hidden’s stories may be structurally different – in the latter, the villain is revealed at the start – both were filmed back-to-back in Welsh and English. And just like Hinterland, Hidden also debuted on S4C, in 2018, before moving to BBC Wales and then BBC Four.

“Hidden was Severn Screen’s first crime drama piece and, from my point of view, it built on a lot of the learnings and the experiences of Hinterland,” Talfan tells DQ from his Cardiff office. “It was also an opportunity to do something very different because Hinterland was much more a ‘story of the week’ – a slightly more Agatha Christie approach to every episode and discovering who’s the killer by the end.

“Whereas Hidden allowed us to lift the lid on a story in a precinct over eight hours to really get into the sinewy depths of the story. It’s less of a whodunit and more of a whydunnit.”

Distributed by All3Media, Hidden went on to run for three seasons. And now, after coproducing ITV true crime series The Pembrokeshire Murders, Talfan and Severn are in the midst of post-production on BBC One and BBC Wales factual drama Steeltown Murders. Written by Ed Whitmore (Manhunt) and based on true events, the four-part English-language series is set in both 1973 and the early 2000s and follows the hunt to catch the killer of three young women in the Port Talbot area. In the first case of its kind, the mystery was eventually solved almost 30 years later using pioneering DNA evidence. All3Media is again distributing.

“We’ve got more projects in development on the crime side and more projects in development that aren’t crime, because we don’t want to end up being a crime company,” Talfan says. “But crime has been good to us in the sense that a lot of this started with Hinterland for us and it’s continued to feed that journey, which has been great.”

Hinterland, he says, gave the team behind the series – and the wider Wales production community – a lot of confidence that a Welsh-language series could find an audience outside of its borders. “It was born out of wanting to see our own culture on screen, so there was a degree of creative pragmatism in terms of turning to the crime genre because that is a genre that sells and people around the world gravitate towards it,” he says. “To do that in Wales was a lot of fun. All the work – ours and others’ – has then grown from that and people are trying different things.

“We’re not making season eight of Hinterland. We’re doing new cycles of work and trying different things. There are senior people on the crew of Steeltown Murders who started with us as runners on Hinterland, so there’s a nice little conveyer belt for all of us moving along and hopefully up.”

Talfan says making Hinterland was fun but stressful. “Production always is,” he notes, though he enjoyed “being in the trenches” with Thomas during the show’s run.

For Thomas, creative director of Hinterland producer Fiction Factory, it wasn’t the first Welsh-language series he had tried to land on BBC Four. He had previously pitched Pen Talar, a state-of-the-nation piece comparable to Germany’s Heimat series. First airing on S4C in 2010, Pen Talar told the stories of two young boys over a 50-year-period.

Though the BBC complimented the series, they left it on the shelf. Then “in a fit of pique,” Thomas tried to imagine a series that could be exported beyond Wales.  He already had experience of shooting back-to-back in different languages after working on 1994’s A Mind to Kill, which starred Philip Madoc as an old-school detective coming to terms with modern policing methods. The idea for Hinterland then emerged from a desire to blend a fresh, rural setting with a grief-stricken outsider in the shape of Harrington’s Mathias, while avoiding any contemporary references, such as shop fronts, that could date the series.

By building a coproduction between S4C and BBC Wales, with support from All3Media International, Thomas got funding for Hinterland over the line, before it was then sold to BBC Four.

“Nothing much has changed in terms of getting proper finance for the Welsh-language versions, despite the success of minority languages,” he says. “Every time we’ve tried to do an indigenous Welsh-language thing to get a level of funding, it’s impossible.” Consequently, he describes his latest effort, Pren Ar Y Bryn (Tree on a Hill) as a “happy accident.” The show is again  being filmed back-to-back in Welsh and English, marking Thomas’s first such project since Hinterland.

An absurdist crime drama commissioned by S4C and the BBC, it is set in the rural Welsh town of Penwyllt, where Clive and Margaret live an unassuming life – until tragedy strikes in the most unexpected way. On the wrong side of middle age and now on the wrong side of the law, this one act sets off a chain of disasters and curious events. Filming began in February and will continue until June, with All3Media distributing.

“There’s a crime at the end of episode one but it’s very much about a town on the cusp of change. That’s the real story, and it’s character-driven,” says Thomas, who has leaned into his theatre background to find the show’s “naughtiness, cheek and warmth.”

“There is a death at the end of the first part, but it’s an accidental one,” he continues. “Then you spin around and realise how that little town deals with change. Hopefully it’s authentic, but the absurdist thing means I feel comfortable, because my roots are in the theatre. We just wanted to originate it from this sense of place and character and change, and how this town and these antiheroes, these very ordinary people, deal with that.”

Scourfield, meanwhile, was the producer of the first two seasons of Hinterland. He went on to produce BBC drama The Miniaturist before stepping into the role of commissioning editor for drama at S4C from 2017 to 2018, where he was an executive producer on Keeping Faith, Bang and Hidden.

Debuting in 2017, Keeping Faith proved to be a record-breaker on BBC iPlayer when it recorded 9.5 million requests, while 300,000 people watched weekly on BBC Wales before the Vox Pictures series transferred to BBC One – the first time an S4C/BBC Wales co-commission had landed on the flagship channel. The show, which ran for three seasons and is distributed by APC, stars Eve Myles as lawyer, wife and mother Faith, who fights to find the truth behind the sudden disappearance of her husband.

Meanwhile, Joio and Artists Studio production Bang follows loner Sam (Jacob Ifans), whose life is transformed when he comes into possession of a gun and starts to break the law. His ambitious police officer sister Gina (Catrin Stewart), however, is on a mission to find the owner of the weapon after a shooting.

In July 2018, Scourfield then joined producer Triongl, which had been set up by Nora Ostler Spiteri and Alec Spiteri. The company produced 2021 psychological thriller Y Golau (The Light in the Hall), which, like Bang, was shot in English and Welsh. It follows three characters connected by the murder of a teenage girl in a small Welsh town 18 years earlier: the man arrested for her murder, her best friend and her mother.

Triongl coproduced the series with Duchess Street Productions and APC Studios for S4C, Channel 4 and US streamer Sundance Now, while APC sold the six-parter to networks including BritBox in Scandinavia, France’s Polar+, AMC in Spain and Portugal and RTS in Switzerland.

When it comes to the interest in Welsh drama, “Hinterland definitely helped,” Scourfield says, while acknowledging the role back-to-back production has had in boosting international interest. That process, he says, is becoming “more and more established, and it gives us a foot in the door. The fact S4C are willing to put their hands in their pocket to develop something, it’s then easier for other broadcasters to come on board so it gives us a chance to get to the table.”

“That’s invaluable for us,” says Ostler Spiteri. “We were the first back-to-back production to meet the high-end TV tax break threshold, for The Light in the Hall, and that shows the confidence generally in that finance plan, because that wouldn’t have happened three years ago. I just feel like there’s more confidence in that model now and there’s more belief that it will work.”

The option of an English version with shows produced in two languages means Welsh still isn’t travelling as far as Scourfield would like, but there’s hope yet. This year, Dal y Mellt (Rough Cut) will be the first solely Welsh-language drama licensed by Netflix, following its launch last year on S4C and BBC iPlayer, thanks to a deal with Abacus Media Rights.

Produced by Vox Pictures, it follows the troubled story of main character Carbo, who is drawn into a world of wrongdoing, lies, secrets and heartbreak. The series starts out on the dark backstreets of Cardiff then moves back and forth between Cardiff, Soho, Porthmadog and Holyhead. “That’s all good for the industry in Wales and confidence in the industry,” Scourfield says.

Triongl is now developing its latest series, Pigeon, which recently won the C21 International Drama Series Pitch competition. Set in the 1990s and based on the book by Aly Conran, it follows two children, Iola and Pijin, who make up stories to deflect from their troubled lives. But when they start believing their fantasies, they come into possession of a gun – and a dead body.

“It’s all a little bit heightened, but even though it’s a fantasy in their head, it’s happening in the real world. The things they’re doing are really happening,” Ostler Spiteri says of the project, which is being written by Angharad Elen. “The lines get blurred between their fantasy and the real world, and they get lost in the blurring of the worlds.

“In terms of production, we imagine it as a hybrid back-to-back, so there’s going to be a bilingual version for S4C that has more Welsh and a bilingual version that has more English. That’s the plan.”

Scourfield, Thomas and Talfan might all be developing or producing new series, but Hinterland is still the calling card they all have in common. “I still get asked about it all the time, and I find it vaguely bonkers,” Talfan says. “You get emails from strange places in the world, places that All3Media have clearly sold it to, asking you about it, and you just think, ‘This is so weird,’ because it was so at odds with what we’d done before – local programming that tended to not really make it out of Wales. We were used to getting feedback from friends, maybe not so much further afield.”

Talfan is also quick to recognise the shows that have continued to fly the flag for Wales, and the impact of the BBC’s decision to make Doctor Who in Cardiff when the iconic sci-fi series was relaunched in 2005.

“Keeping Faith was a great success, Hidden was a success, and it’s given more visibility to home-grown stories,” he adds. “There was a quick commercial dividend because of the BBC’s decision to relaunch Doctor Who in Wales. Now the cultural dividend is being realised, and I’d like to think we’re part of that.”

tagged in: All3Media International, BBC Four, BBC Wales, Bron/Broen, Craith, Ed Talfan, Ed Thomas, Ed Whitmore, Engrenages, Forbrydelsen, Gethin Scourfield, Hidden, Hinterland, Inspector Montalbano, Richard Harrington, S4C, Severn Screen, Siân Reese-Williams, Spiral, Steeltown Murders, The Killing, The Pembrokeshire Murders, Wallander, Y Gwyll