Out There, ITV1 review - drugs and thugs disfigure the Welsh landscape

If nothing else, ITV’s new thriller Out There is a fabulous advertisement for the Welsh countryside. Many scenes were shot in Brecon and the Black Mountains, amid acres of wild, rambling moorland and majestic hillsides. But it’s not always a happy place. Here, farmer Nathan Williams (Martin Clunes) is trying to hang on to his family business, but profits are low, overheads are high, and the recently widowed Nathan isn’t as young as he used to be.

The dire state of the rural economy is rammed home when his friend and neighbour, Owen Thomas, succumbs to depression, locks himself in his barn and shoots himself. Nathan has a notion that he could buy Owen’s farm and try to make a success of it, but his friendly local bank manager – actually, when did anybody last see a bank manager? – takes a look at Nathan’s financial situation and declares the suggestion to be “fucking nuts”.The backdrop of the story concerns a company called Black Mountain Estates, which exploits the financial difficulties of people in Nathan’s situation to buy up chunks of local real estate at knockdown prices, and their representative is Scott Foley (Michael Obiora). Foley is a smug, scheming slimeball in a shiny suit, but nonetheless, Nathan is almost tempted to sell out, except that fate prods events in a rather different direction when Nathan’s son Johnny (Louis Ashbourne Serkis, pictured above with Clunes) falls foul of a low-rent drug dealer, Rhys (Gerran Howell). Johnny thought Rhys was his buddy (possibly because he was distracted by fancying Rhys’s sister Sadie, played by Carly-Sophia Davies), but he’s brutally brought to the realisation that Rhys is a desperate little hustler who’ll do anything for a fast buck.

Long story short, Johnny is cynically manipulated into doing incriminating favours for Rhys, a slippery slope which ends up with him being involved in the death of the odious dealer, Kenny (Josef Altin). It’s a turn of events which spurs Nathan into action to save his son, and he finds himself having to contend with a ruthless and highly-organised drug-dealing network headed by the sinister Turuk (Silas Carson), a man who wouldn’t think twice about having you kneecapped, dipped in gasoline and incinerated.

It’s not a world Nathan has any knowledge of, but he’s stubborn and resourceful, and he also gets some help from his brother Caleb (played by the dependable Mark Lewis Jones, pictured right). The brothers have been somewhat estranged in the past years, not least because of some bad feeling over their inheritance from their late father, but blood eventually proves to be thicker than water, and Caleb’s experience as a Marine has given him some skills which come in very handy in a crisis.

Screenwriter Ed Whitmore (Waking the Dead, Silent Witness, Manhunt and more) has concocted a dramatically compelling story which works all the better for the way in which it’s been knitted skilfully into its Welsh locations (Clunes does a very plausible Welsh accent, and also gets a chance to indulge his passion for dogs and horses). Some sure-footed casting has delivered a string of memorable performances. Eiry Thomas is terrific as PC Jane Crowther, an old-school copper with excellent instincts who’s undervalued by patronising, management-jargon-spouting superior officers, and Natalia Kostrzewa gradually reveals hidden depths as Nathan’s Polish house-cleaner, Eva. A second series looks like it might be a possibility.

• Out There continues on ITV1 on 26 & 27 January. All episodes available on ITVX
• More TV reviews on theartsdesk