Mudtown (U&Alibi)
Are you an easy touch, a bleeding-heart liberal? Take this simple quiz to find out, based on a courtroom scene in the South Wales crime drama Mudtown.
Imagine you’re a magistrate. A young man, Sonny Higgins (Lloyd Meredith), is brought before the bench. A glance at his psychiatric report tells you he suffered a tough childhood — brought up in council care, when he was seven years old his foster mother killed herself. He discovered her body.
It’s a shocking story. But Higgins is in court for animal cruelty: he threw his ex-girlfriend’s chihuahua off an eighth floor balcony.
Asked why he did it, he tells the court with a smirk: ‘Dog barking, ex shouting, just wanted peace and quiet. It worked.’
That, to me, is genuinely unforgivable. I’d sentence him to transportation for life, if it was still possible.
Magistrate Claire (Erin Richards) takes a different view. Higgins has ‘turned over a new leaf’. He’s let off with a fine.
By the end of the first episode in this six-part thriller, we realised karma has some cosmic retribution planned for Claire.
Higgins’s new girlfriend is her own daughter, A-level student Beca (Lauren Morais). And whatever he’s got in store for her, it won’t involve the Oxbridge entrance exams.
Tom Cullen and Erin Richards star in the South Wales crime drama Mudtown
Mudtown starts an all-Welsh cast including and was filmed in both Welsh and English and is set at Newport Magistrates’ Court. Pictured: Erin Richards in Mudtown
The six-part crime dram was first broadcast in Welsh on S4C and is set to be broadcast in English on U&Alibi. Pictured: Tom Cullen in Mudtown
Daily Mail TV Critic Christopher Stevens gives the show a rating four stars out of five. Pictured: Matthew Gravelle in Mudtown
The show is filmed in Newport, along the coast from Cardiff, with the city’s distinctive magistrates’ court featured prominently.
There’s a romantic sheen cast over the docks, a sort of soft focus shimmer, though that might be drizzle.
Co-writers Georgia Lee (herself a magistrate) and Hannah Daniel (who played lawyer Cerys in another Welsh drama, Keeping Faith) did part of their research by sitting in the court’s public gallery, watching real cases.
Fans of Keeping Faith will lap up Mudtown. Both dramas are centred on strong-minded, competent women, haunted by their past mistakes, juggling jobs and family while married to fairly useless men.
Claire’s husband is played by Matthew Gravelle, who made such a strong impression in Broadchurch that I wouldn’t trust him if he was playing St Francis of Assisi.
But the most dangerous man in her life is former childhood sweetheart Pete (Tom Cullen), now a small-town Mr Big.
He turns up in the ladies’ toilets at court, trying to intimidate Claire into jailing a defendant who could cause trouble for him.
‘Don’t let him out,’ Pete warns menacingly. ‘He’s gonna be safer inside.’
Instead, she lets the youth walk free on bail. Sure enough, he gets two bullets in the stomach as he goes to fetch fish and chips.
He’d have been better off if Claire was the lock-’em-up-and-throw-away-the-key type.
But she grew up in poverty on a housing estate, and likes to think she’s ‘one of the people’ — spending her coffee breaks chatting to tramps, that sort of thing.
Oh, and don’t call them tramps, says Claire. They’re ‘human beings’. Yes, your Worship.