WELSH TV -- GOODBYE CELTIC NOIR, HELLO CELTIC WEIRD
One minute we are celebrating the brilliant "Men Up", and the next minute we are thinking "What on earth is happening with Welsh TV?"
Ten years ago the critics were lauding "Hinterland" in Wales which followed "Shetland" in Scotland as a pioneer of this new thing called "Celtic Noir". I enjoyed "Hinterland" although its unremittingly dark portrayal of Wales was not to everybody's liking. It didn't succeed in quite the same way as "Shetland" did, and it did get a bit tired towards the end of its run. A bit more humour might have helped. It didn't make a vast amount of money. But it inspired a host of other effective dramas including "Hidden" and "Keeping Faith", and a number of other TV series filmed in both Welsh and English which seem to have become increasingly bizarre over the years. Some have been good and others have been terrible. Then we had the police investigative real crime reconstruction dramas called "The Pembrokeshire Murders" and "Steeltown Murders" -- the first pretty impressive and the second, in my opinion, somewhat contrived and overblown.
Then we come to the latest (2024) heavily promoted drama series. Am I the only one who gave up watching "The Way" at the end of the first episode, and then did the same with "Tree on a Hill" a few nights ago? Both truly dreadful programmes, in my opinion. "The Way" was a pretentious mish-mash of social protest rhetoric, ludicrous storyline, fairy tale, magic and historical symbolism. Some people liked it, I suppose, but segments of the media re-named it "The Mess", and I can see why. OK -- it was Michael Sheen's obsession and his name was enough to get it financed, created and broadcast. But did it do anything for the reputation of Welsh TV or the Welsh nation? I fear not.
As for "Tree on a Hill", I found it quite bizarre, which I suppose was the intention of Ed Thomas, who created it, wrote the script, executive produced, and directed it. Eccentricity in characterisation and storyline is OK, but here the characters are so bizarre and caricatured that they are all deeply unlikeable. In "establishing shots", the attempts to flesh out the characters of the key players are very crude. The storyline is preposterous. And the whole episode, which should hook in the viewer, is laboured and pretentious. Conversations are for the most part somewhat banal. The actors look bored. Scene after scene goes on for far too long, and all the humour falls flat. It is, after all, promoted as a "dark comedy"............ I wonder if Ed is trying to rebrand himself as the Salvador Dali of Wales? Surrealism is fine, in its place, but this is a mish-mash, maybe arising from a determination to push creative boundaries and create some great work of art that is impossible to pigeon-hole or categorize. Exciting? Radical? Experimental? Ground-breaking? Hmmmmm......
At the end of the first episode I found myself longing for a classical drama following the simple rule of portraying ordinary people caught up in extraordinary events....... I can understand that Welsh screenwriters and production companies want to do exciting and innovative work, and I can understand why the financiers and the broadcasters (not to mention Creative Wales) want to give their support, but drama output should be aimed not at earnest discussion groups in Film and TV degree courses, but at the viewing public.
So please, no more Celtic Weird. Arguably, Wales has already been misrepresented for too long already in TV dramas as a place of psychopaths dwelling in semi-derelict farmhouses up on the wild moorlands of mid-Wales. So de we now want it to be misrepresented again, this time as a place inhabited by complete nutters?
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