Kayleigh Llewellyn’s Welsh series about a teenager hiding her mother’s illness from her friends is short, funny and far harder than it looks. Gabrielle Creevy carries it with two faces, and the father is the one character drawn with less care than he needed.
Bethan Gwyndaf (Gabrielle Creevy) has worked out that the easiest way to get through school is to have a different life there. At school she is quick, rude and funny, trading insults with Lydia (Poppy Lee Friar) and Travis (James Wilbraham) and staring across the classroom at Poppy (Leilah Hughes). At home her mother Katrina (Jo Hartley) is on a psychiatric ward and her father Dilwyn (Rhodri Meilir) is drunk or absent. Kayleigh Llewellyn, who created and wrote In My Skin, has made a series about the effort it takes to keep those two rooms from sharing a wall. We recommend it, and warmly. It runs to ten episodes across two series, none of them longer than half an hour, and it does more with that time than most dramas manage with three times as much.
Creevy is the reason it works. Watch her come through the school gates in the morning and watch her come through the hospital doors in the afternoon; it is the same girl, and the walk is different, the voice is different, the eyes are set differently. The scene that got us comes early, when Katrina, high and certain and talking fast, tells her daughter how the world is going to go and Bethan simply waits for her to finish. Creevy’s face does nothing at all. We had to look away from the screen for a moment, and it was the stillness that did it, not anything said.
Hartley is as good in the opposite direction. Her Katrina is loud when she is unwell and frightened when she is not, and the series never lets us settle on which version is the real one, which is honest about the illness. Lucy Forbes directs so that a scene can start as a joke and end somewhere else without a change of lighting or music to warn us. Benedict Spence shoots Cardiff in ordinary daylight, terraces and bus stops and the hospital car park, and keeps the camera close enough to Creevy that we are watching her decide what to say before she says it. Peter Oliver and Mike Hopkins cut hard from classroom to ward and back, so the two lives keep bumping into each other even when Bethan has kept them apart. Tommy Gray’s music is sparing and mostly stays out of the hospital.
It is funny, and the comedy is not relief from the sadness so much as the same material seen from the other side. Di Botcher’s Nana is the one adult who reliably turns up, and she is given a dry, practical warmth rather than a saintly one. Aled Ap Steffan’s Stan Priest, Jac Yarrow’s Jamie and Alexandria Riley’s Ms Morgan, the English teacher who reads Bethan’s poems and takes them seriously, fill out a school that feels like a school rather than a set of lessons about one. Travis in particular gets lines we laughed at out loud, and then the series reminds us that he does not know what Bethan goes home to either.
The weakness is Dilwyn. Meilir plays him with conviction, but Llewellyn has written a man to be flinched from rather than understood, and across ten episodes we learn a great deal about what he does and almost nothing about why. The school plot also runs familiar roads: the crush, the party, the lie that is bound to come out. The series knows this and moves fast enough that it rarely matters, but it does mean the home scenes are always the ones we were waiting for.
The first series arrived on 14 October 2018 and the second on 7 November 2021, five episodes each, and the second finishes the story rather than stretching it. Most of the critics we have read are as warm as we are, and the few who came to it later found the same thing: it looks like a teen comedy and is not one. The Cardiff voices are quick and the slang is local; if you lose a line, Creevy’s face will give it back.
Watch the two series close together, in an evening or two. It is under five hours in total, and it is about a girl who has become expert at not being looked at, which the series answers by never once taking its eyes off her.
