TV court drama putting Newport in the spotlight

Welsh actors Tom Cullen and Erin Richards lead the cast in Mudtown, set in Newport

A dual-language series is set to take viewers behind the scenes at a Welsh criminal court.

Mudtown, starring an all-Welsh cast including Erin Richards, Tom Cullen, Lauren Morais, Lloyd Meredith and Kimberley Nixon, was filmed in both Welsh and English and is set at Newport Magistrates' Court.

It sees magistrate Claire Lewis Jones, played by Richards, navigate her loyalty to her community being put to the test, complicated by the re-emergence of past acquaintance, Cullen's Saint Pete, who is dubbed "the Tony Soprano of Newport".

"We're representing a part of Wales that isn't seen very often," said Richards.

Gotham star Richards, who is originally from Penarth, Vale of Glamorgan, said the Severn Screen production, which aired on S4C in Welsh and will be on UKTV in English, was "one of my favourite projects that I've ever done".

"I didn't even know what a magistrate was when I first signed up to this wonderful project," she told Lucy Owen on Radio Wales, adding she was advised by writers Hannah Daniel and Georgia Lee to spend time in courtrooms in both Cardiff and Newport to get a sense of what it was really like.

"You see a lot of courtroom dramas, but it's kind of heavy on the drama when you see it on TV.

"Obviously they're there to help people and do good for the community… but also in between when people were in the dock and it was just the people working there, they were just having normal conversations, and getting on like work colleagues do. Which I hope we have portrayed in the piece as well."

She continued: "Magistrates are amazing. They don't get paid and they have to do a lot of training to get where they are.

"They are dealing with quite difficult cases sometimes and every case I saw was just them trying to bring some sort of common sense to the situation."

Richards, who has a two-year-old son, River, and is expecting her second child, said she was able to relate to her character in many ways.

"Claire is a mother, she's a magistrate, she's trying to hold down a couple of jobs and, on the surface, she appears to be a good person, until the end of the first episode when Saint Pete comes into her courtroom," she said.

"We realise she's got quite a dark past. They call him the Tony Soprano of Newport and he asks her for a favour because he says 'you owe me one'.

"I've made mistakes in my past and I think we've all had roads that we've had to choose between. I've never done anything as bad as Claire, but I sort of empathise with that part of her."

Erin Richards says she hopes, through her character Claire, to represent a part of Wales not often seen on TV

She said it was "a joy" to work with Cullen as, like their characters, they have a long history, with Richards introducing Cullen to his now-fiancée, and the couple living just "down the road" from her in Cardiff.

"It was really interesting because Tom and I have been friends for a really long time. I think we started knowing each other when we were 16 or 17," she said.

"I just think the history that we have as people and the knowledge that we have – the mistakes that we've made, the parties we've been to, whatever we've done in the past – then transferred into our characters."

Speaking about recording scenes back-to-back in English and Welsh, Richards said it was challenging at first but, after a while, her "brain just clicked".

"It means that you get a lot fewer takes, because obviously you have to do it in both languages and you don't have any more time in the day," she said.

"A lot of things on Welsh TV, quite rightly, all the language is perfect. People mutate perfectly and they don't use a lot of English words.

"But what I really enjoyed is that we portrayed the kind of Welsh that you would hear in Newport, through Claire, which is also the kind of Welsh I speak.

"It's not as sophisticated, but it is real and I really thought it was important that we are representing an area of Wales in that way, because that's how people speak there."