Helo
Matthew, thank you so much for following us. I'm loving the series, I hadn't
realised that the initial launch of the drama was in Welsh, and that it was
called One Wednesday Morning. I'd been waiting for Keeping Faith to appear on
my screen for some time, so was at first, a little confused.
The
new series for BBC 1 Wales comes out next year I believe, how will that play
out? Will the series be dubbed in English, or will the same scenes be played
out in English?
Matthew: The English version comes out from mid
Feb. Initially on BBC Wales, but we hope it will be shown on BBC 2 soon after
and are currently talking to the BBC about that.
There were five
co-producers involved, including the S4C, BBC Wales, Pinewood Studios, a US
distributor and a distributor for the rest of the world. We are intending for
the show to travel far and wide!
The English episodes will
be 10 minutes longer at 60 minutes each. Each scene was shot in both English
and in Welsh, so you will see literally nothing of the Welsh version in the
English one. The Amy Wadge songs are also different. It will be a substantially
different experience and for my money will hang together a bit better. Quite a
few difficult cutting decisions have been made in order to get the show down to
50 minutes.
When
you said it took 5 years from outline to screen - why was the reason for that?
I wrote the first
treatment for Keeping Faith / Un Bore Mercher in late 2012 and shared it with
Pip Broughton, the show’s co-producer and director. She showed it to a number
of broadcasters and in 2013 it was S4C who responded. They commissioned all 8
scripts for series one. Then the fun began. I wrote the scripts between writing
my novels and other scripts. There was a lot of editorial to and fro and a long
process of getting the broadcaster to move to production. S4C is a small
broadcaster with only a few slots and productions are scheduled years in
advance.
Pip finally pitched the
show at a European Convention of TV producers and financiers in Paris in May
2016. The idea for Keeping Faith attracted a lot of attention. Out of this we
attracted French distribution company
which wanted to invest in the series. Pip and her co-producer Adrian Bate then
built confidence in the show by attracting more investment and critically by
tempting Eve Myles to accept the part. We finally got the go ahead in early
2017. The production is not high budget, but it has a lot of participants –
S4C, BBC Wales, French distributors, About Premium Content and US distributors,
Acorn.
They
say to write about what you know, and you certainly know about being a
barrister - did that help in some way in creating the drama series?
I was a barrister for
about five years before I became a writer and I have written a lot of legal
drama over the years. I guess I am interested in the law because it always
takes you to fraught, dramatic and morally difficult situations. I never wanted Keeping Faith to be a legal
show, though. It’s all about a woman discovering and using inner strength she
never knew she had. Her role as a solicitor in a small community is
dramatically helpful because it links her to all sorts of people and also means
that she might know their secrets!
The
series is in Welsh primarily - are you fluent Welsh, or was the dialogue
translated into Welsh for you?
My family is Welsh, I live
in Wales, but the everyday use of the language stopped with my grandparents. I
am now learning and am determined – inspired by Eve Myles – to be
conversationally proficient by the end of 2018. It has been a long term project
of mine and I am under way. Welsh is a beautiful, lyrical language and I think
we should do our best to preserve and promote it. I wrote the scripts in
English and they are translated by Anwen Hughes, who is a prolific screenwriter
in the Welsh language.
Was
it your decision for Eve and Bradley to play husband and wife in the series, or
did you not have much say in who was cast? Or had you an idea who you wanted in
the drama series? I know sometimes it is based on who is available at that time
from what I’ve come to learn in the past.
Bradley’s casting was a
happy accident. Any successful production needs their fair share of them!
Bradley originally read for the part of Steve Baldini, but the director, Pip,
suggested he try the part of Evan. She liked what she saw and heard. Bradley
had to change his image, cut his hair and shave off a beard, apparently, to
give him the clean cut unassuming look we needed for Evan. He has pulled it off
magnificently. The fact that he and Eve are real life husband and wife adds a
whole new dimension – they are so natural with each other in a way it would be
hard for two actors who didn’t know each other so well to emulate. This is one of the many blessings we have had
in the production.
You
write about a character called Jenny Cooper, is she a similar character to
Faith?
I have written seven
novels featuring coroner, Jenny Cooper. She’s a tough independent woman who is
determined to get to the truth, and does, but emotionally she is rather
different from Faith. Jenny is recently
divorced and her 13 year old son, Ross, has chosen to stay with his dad when we
meet her in the first novel, The Coroner.
While she is brilliant in her work she is quite lonely and has mixed
fortunes finding a relationship. She is a compassionate and determined woman,
though, and like Faith, uncompromising.
I don’t set out to write
female characters but have found that they are often the most interesting.
Women have to fulfil so many different roles and expectations and never feel
they have performed any of them as well as they would like. They often feel
they can’t win, which makes perfect material for story telling.
You
have a passion for trees and preservation - where did this stem (no pun intended)
from or have you always been a strong believer in protecting the woodlands?
I love the countryside,
the wilder the better. Until I was 10 my
parents lived in London and Manchester for work and I was desperate to get to
my grandparents’ in Wales at every holiday. From age 11 we moved close to them
and my love of the countryside grew deeper. From my early 20s to mid-30s I
lived in London with my wife and kids and was never happy living in the city.
When I came back to live in Wales in 2003 I knew it was home for good. I live
surrounded by trees and adore them. They live for hundreds of years which makes
them far older (and probably wiser) than us. They provide oxygen, habitat and
food for wildlife and if you build something out of timber like oak it can last
more than 1000 years. We now understand that trees aren’t individuals but
connected by a fantastic underground network of fungi through which they
transfer nutrients to one another. A woodland is a whole living organism.
Without trees there would be no human beings, so I think we should all love
them a little more!
Is
this a one off series or will it be a regular series? I'm totally enjoying Un
Bore Mercher, the setting, the characters, I'd love it if it were a regular,
but obviously, not knowing the outcome of the story, and perhaps given it took
5 years to come together - perhaps you're not wishing for another 5 years of
your life going into a second series. Maybe?
I have started work on
writing a series 2 which we hope to be filming from August 2018 for broadcast
Spring 2019. And then we hope for a series 3. I am really looking forward in
going deeper and deeper into the lives of our central characters in the next
series with lots more unexpected revelations.
What
lies ahead after Keeping Faith? Will you bring out more dramas like these or
are you working on already developed series' such as John Deed style or other?
While the series has been
filming I have written a new stand-alone novel called, The Black Art of
Killing, which will be published in 2018. In 2018 I will be writing series 2 of
Keeping Faith and working on developing several new TV projects. I am also
hoping that a Canadian TV adaptation of my Jenny Cooper novels will get
underway. With a bit of luck, I will be very busy.
Thank you for an awesome
interview, Matthew.
You can find out more
about Matthew and his work by copying and pasting or clicking on the link to
his website. There you will find out more about his novels, and how and where
to buy them.
