More Welsh TV drama please!

It was great to see the three-part drama called "The Pembrokeshire Murders" on ITV over the past three evenings.  And good to see that it had a very positive response from viewers, in spite of press reviews that were somewhat mixed.  It was a difficult thing to pull off -- a police procedural series rather than a crime drama.  We knew the killer from the beginning, and there were few opportunities for action sequences or even for moments of high drama -- so the pace was deliberately somewhat ponderous and the tension did lapse now and then.  But it was a pleasure to see a full cast of Welsh actors -- all filling their roles brilliantly.  Keith Allen -- as the murderer John Cooper -- stole the show with a bravado display of terrifying intensity, but Luke Evans was a revelation too, playing the lead role in such an understated way that one longed for him just to lose his rag every now and then, just to show that he was human. The storyline was a bit too formulaic for my liking, with too many echoes of "Hinterland", but I suppose that if people like Celtic Noir, there is always room for another series........

There has been a lot of discussion on social media about "authenticity" -- and one of the points made is that not one of the actors managed a South Pembs accent.  Not an easy one, I admit!  But are there no professional actors from the south of the county? More discussion has centred on the extensive use of non-Pembrokeshire locations -- with many people wondering why on earth the Port Talbot waterfront occupied just as much screen time as Pembrokeshire.  I suppose the answer is that beautiful scenery was not treated as a top priority in this series -- it was more important to find locations that would add to the gloomy and bleak atmosphere, with grey seas and skies.   There have been other discussions on whether the characters were "filled out" enough, and on illogicalities and contradictions in the storyline; but on that score no drama series has ever satisfied all of the viewers all of the time.

So did the series do any good for Pembrokeshire and its tourism industry? Well, I suspect that the title, with the word "Pembrokeshire" in it, attracted many viewers who might not otherwise have tuned in, and having Luke Evans in the lead role must also have helped a bit!!  The series was not a showpiece for Pembrokeshire landscape -- nor should it have been, since the priority of the production team was not to sell Wales but to tell a good story.  Spinoffs?  Yes, of course there will be some... and the very act of bringing Pembrokeshire briefly to the attention of TV viewers is bound to enhance the prospects for bringing Martha Morgan and her story to the small screen........