Location, location, location... a tangible sense of place and local identity can make or break a TV drama, and Under Salt Marsh exploits this to the full. It’s a haunting murder mystery, triggered by the discovery of the body of eight-year-schoolboy Cefin in a drainage ditch near the small town of Morfa Halen (that’s Welsh for “salt marsh”). Its aura of foreboding and sadness is infinitely enhanced by being set amid beautiful but austere Welsh countryside and coastline, particularly the marshy flatlands which give it its title.
Cefin’s death takes on extra layers of significance when we learn that it comes in the wake of the unsolved disappearance of a young local girl, Nessa, three years earlier. As chance would have it, the person who found the deceased Cefin is Jackie Ellis (Kelly Riley). She’s now a primary school teacher, but she used to be a police officer, and was involved in the search for the missing Nessa... who was also her niece. The fallout from the case triggered the end of her police career, and has evidently inflicted lasting emotional damage.
Her partner in crime, as it were, is Detective Eric Bull. Or at least was, since the Nessa case wreaked havoc with both their professional and personal relationship, not least because Bull accused Jackie's sister – Nessa's mum – of murdering the girl. Jackie is aghast when Bull is assigned to lead the Cefin investigation, and comes stomping around treating her more like a suspect than merely the person unlucky enough to find the deceased boy.
Rafe Spall plays Bull with what sounds like a weirdly warped Brummie accent – it isn’t Welsh anyway – and is altogether thoroughly objectionable. You could call him blunt or you might prefer bloody rude, and hifalutin’ concepts like empathy and concern have been erased from his repertoire, if they were ever there.
Meanwhile, screenwriter and director Claire Oakley has worked hard to people the neighbourhood with an eccentric array of characters. For instance, there’s the menacing Osian, who Jackie has to shoo away from the school gates because he’s pestering the pupils. The burly, hairy Osian looks like Bryn Terfel’s crazed long-lost brother and tends to spout apocalyptic doggerel, though he may turn out to be a red herring.
Slightly more disturbing is Kieran Benbow (Morgan Watkins), who lives in a shack on a desolate peninsula known as Spider Island. He also keeps bees, and when bee stings pop up as a recurring motif suspicion is inevitably aroused. Especially as both the late Cefin and absent Nessa drew pictures of someone they called “the bee man”, who actually looks like some kind of astronaut.
Then there’s Jonathan Pryce (pictured right) as Solomon Bevan, Cefin's grandfather. He's a village elder who fixes people with a baleful stare, and gathers the locals on the beach and orates in a loud hellfire-preacher voice. The Welsh news website Nation.Cymru has deplored the show’s “predictable casting of English leads in Welsh roles”, so at least the Flintshire-born Pryce redresses the balance a bit.
Meanwhile, the hysteria quotient is rising exponentially because a severe storm is blowing up out at sea, and looks set to hit Morfa Halen with traumatic force. This is a concern for the investigators, since it’s liable to cause catastrophic flooding and obliterate any traces of evidence that might help solve Cefin’s killing. But it also feels a bit like a plot-gimmick too far, adding a dollop of melodrama the story doesn’t really need. Wait and see, I guess.
Episodes 1 and 2 of Under Salt Marsh are available on Sky Atlantic and NOW
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