Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
Cast: Eve Myles, Mark Lewis Jones, Hannah David, Matthew Gravelle, Bradley Freegard, Mali Harries, Aneirin Hughes, Rhian Morgan, Eiry Thomas, Catherine Ayers, Alex Harries, Suzanne Packer, Betsan Llwyd, Kizzy Crawford, Colin Murtagh, Mark Preston, Menna Trussler, Pinar Ögün.
To trust someone is to understand their faults and understand that they may let you down, nobody is perfect after all and we all have the chance to be put in the way of temptation, be it in the way of sex, money or greed, we all the opportunity to be exploited for our mistakes and lack of at the time judgement, but it is to love someone when you know you might get hurt, when the foundations of their actions will cause you to see them in a different light.
It is an outlook which is often the mainstay of television serials, of all dramas, the point where someone has their life on hold because of a disappearance, of a reckless moment in which answers are few and the questions many, we play detective, putting their lives together with the clues they leave us and quite often those pieces of evidence are damning, a sign of the faltering spirit in us all.
What makes this particular series such an eye-opener is in how the cast dealt with the side by side recording of putting the show together in two languages, a concurrent filming of Welsh and English, not only is that impressive, but for a mainstream television programme on the B.B.C. it is fairly unique. It is testament to the nature of the acting fraternity that the cast, even those who were not fluent in the language of their birth, not only pulled off the demand of the duality of speech and inference throughout, but did it with a sense of pride and joy in the filming of such a remarkable series.
It is to actors such as Eve Myles, perhaps unfairly always associated with the B.B.C. flagship programme of Doctor Who’s spin off show Torchwood, as the eponymous Faith, Mark Lewis Jones as the wary Steve Baldini, Hannah Daniel as the force of nature and at times brutally honest fellow lawyer Cerys Jones and Eiry Thomas’s uptight and devastating on the point of corruption D.I. Williams, that Keeping Faith was able to hold the attention of the viewer over eight well paced episodes.
In a story-line that may have had the chance to wander off point if not kept a very strong arm upon, Keeping Faith is a piece of television that deserves credit, in which the structure of drama is intensified as the viewer realises that each person portrayed is capable of being as low and corruptible as possible but to whom can also rise so very high; a television drama that accepts its responsibility to the viewer and to pushing the actors to a place where language is held lovingly and with honour.
Ian D. Hall