Keeping Faith

[ShreddedFeet]

Did anyone watch this back in the spring?

I did. I loved it albeit the ending a bit incomplete- left open for series 2.

Why is it on again so soon? I see it's on BBC Wales again tonight. It doesn't say it's a repeat but surely it can't be series 2 already?

I watched this on BBC1 just s few months ago. I waited week yo week got the next instalment. The series was 8 weeks long.
Anyone know why they are repeating this so soon?

Btw Faith and Evan are married in real life.

Matthew Hall was the screen writer and astonishingly he wrote for Kavanns QC and a Wing and a Prayer. Unbelievable given the complete inaccuracy portrayed in court by Faith. Has he forgotten all his research?

I've just googled Eve Myles (who I'm clearly now obsessed with) and one of the first things that came up was 'eve myles feet' wierd given the feet thing. It went to a site called 'wikifeet' with loads of pictures of her feet. It's all very odd.

www.wikifeet.com/Eve_Myles

Mumshotel oohh good theory on Evan being in contact with Arthur

I've got a bit of thing for Baldini too. Yum!
Definitely think the other cops are corrupt, but not the main one; she's just on her own mission to fuck Faith over.
Something odd about the brother-in-law though..

Baldini is one of those 'shouldn't be attractive but so is' if you know what i mean. I might have got a twinkle tingle when he was doing press ups in the cell 😆

God this is so turgid but of course I have to watch next week. As a criminal lawyer, albeit not in Wales, the inaccuracy is staggering!

Ginger,! Its fucking unbelievable

Mark LEWIS JAMES !!!

It’s weird. I don’t do beards but he looks very sexy with one abs much better then clean shaven

Reminds me of red so Abraham in walking dead

He was lovely

Gutted when he died :(

Is Faith an orphan with no siblings ?
How quickly she fell into the arms of Baldini despite the shock of her husband disappearing and the car crash her life has become.
Why did paternal granny not take in the children ?
Suspension of disbelief is a necessity watching it.

Duel language - they film the scene twice (in the two languages) . All credit to her she learned Welsh for the part. I came to this after watching the other Welsh programme Craith which I thought was dreadful, slow, thin plot, terrible moody filming so dark it was hard to view and with jumpy frame rates and endless repetition. By contrast KF is a breath of fresh air. I love that almost all the main characters are strong females. I find the close bond between mother and daughters and Faith and friends both touching and authentic. The Cardigan Bay scenes are wonderful and the plot moves along nicely and is economical. Scene 7 is magnificent. The most powerful emotion in drama beautifully acted and the direction and production is wonderful. I watch a lot of Japanese, Taiwanese and Korean drama now that true Nordic noir appears to have stopped. This Welsh programme is one of the best.

Surely compliance with legal procedure or law is hardly the point. This is fiction and the law is not the central subject.

The face at the window was Baldini but nothing sinister in that. It was clever I thought as it really could have been Evan.

I actually preferred Craith to this TBH. In fact I was more hooked on Craith than Hinterland.

Nicky898 its not the point but it is irritating and makes the programme shoddy and unrealistic.
If they are playing a role, they need to at least yet it right. Imagine if they were playing a firefighter and they tried to put a fire out with glitter instead of water. It would be odd and you would wonder what's going on.

What's the face in the window?

Faith saw a face in the window of her kitchen after scan dissapeered

@Nicky898 - is that you Eve Myles?

Ha ha Charlie50 I thought the same.

I do like eve myles tho. Shes never annoyed me before. Just this character. But im a bit like obsessed annoyed with her ha.

I don't know faith being an orphan. Or family. I can't ever remember any reference to it.

I agree that Faith seems to have developed feelings for steve very quickly however he is the only one who had truly been there for her. Perhaps her feelings are confused because she is so vulnerable and emotional at the moment. He is protective of her and perhaps makes her feel safe.

I'm just watching the episode now & agree Crinkle. He's big, burly, seemingly honest & protective of her - she's emotionally all over the place so I'm not surprised either.

Interesting to observe how female critics, irritated by the character Myles plays, transfer their frustration into criticism of Myles herself. They don't do that with male roles, indeed Baldini even gets a fan club.
I thought the mini video of Aly's was a beautiful, poignant touch summing up the situation. Looking forward to the first series finale.
As a side note, I know some enjoyed Hidden which was also very popular in Wales but to say it is the new Nordic Noir and compare it with the likes of Wallander, The Bridge, The Killing, Dragon Tattoo, as one journalist did is fantasy.

Just found (on BBC) the writer answering the question "What was the origin of the drama Keeping Faith?" Matthew Hall answers ... I wrote the pitch document for Keeping Faith very quickly - in a day or two. A character sprang into my mind. She was a very warm, very maternal, very emotional woman who was a friend and mother to all but who had somehow failed to realise her true potential. This was Faith. The principal elements of Faith’s character and the basic spine of the story were all there in that document.

The Welsh language station, S4C, who showed interested and commissioned all eight scripts at once. Then began what would become three years of writing, which I threaded between books. It was also a tough time for my family. My son was very ill for a long period, I was running out of money, we had to sell the house for a smaller one but the house took nearly three years to sell …. Persisting with Keeping Faith became a metaphor for our lives over that period. It seemed for a while that everything might collapse and I got to a point where I was quite prepared for that. Many writers will tell you a similar story of events in their lives. It sometimes seems that you have to go to the brink of disaster before dawn breaks.

Dawn did break in early 2016 when firstly Eve Myles agreed on the fourth time of asking to accept the role and French distributors showed interest and wanted to invest in the project. BBC Wales got on board and more finance came from the Welsh Assembly. A project that had almost sunk and taken us with it suddenly sprang to life. I wasn’t going to be starting a painting and decorating business, which was my brilliant plan B.

I've started so I'll finish:

Her voice – the unselfconscious ability to express what’s going on inside in expletive-laden speech – is something of an amalgam of various women I know. Not all of them Welsh, but several of them are. The people I warm to most are those who take themselves least seriously, that’s perhaps Faith’s chief quality.

There was also a very serious aspect to Faith’s character, which is that like so many women I have known since I was young, she has not fulfilled her potential in the world but is a brilliant mother. It is so common among women - they start out on high-flying careers then veer off in their 30s and have to juggle children, elderly relatives and all sorts of things as well as what they can salvage of their careers. This happened to my wife. It wasn’t so much a choice as a fait accompli. She was a barrister, had two young kids and her health collapsed under the strain of trying to keep it all together. More significantly I could see that she was being forced to a choice - be the nurturing mother she desperately wanted to be or be a successful high-earning lawyer who doesn’t see much of her kids. There was really no middle way. It’s a painful thing to watch and I guess this experience fed into Faith.

It was important that Faith’s commendable choice to put her children first and stay home for an extended period was the catalyst for the disaster that ensued. This fact dramatises the sheer impossibility of the dilemmas so many women face in their lives - they cannot please everyone no matter what they do. I wanted her husband to be supportive of her choices but at the same time to be suffering the consequences. Faith’s absences pushes him to the brink of financial disaster and leads him into a secret criminal life.