Cardiff club singer Sara Lloyd-Gregory flees to a drab West Wales flat with ten-year-old Daniel, promising the boy they’ll save enough cash to reach Florida’s Cape Canaveral. To bankroll the dream she shoplifts, steals cars and sells sex in the back of a rusty estate, while the town’s genteel shopkeepers—William Thomas, Gillian Elisa and Aneirin Hughes—pretend not to notice the bruises on her collarbone. The series was shot on location in Barry Island, Brecon and Cardiff, giving the seaside tat a salt-bleached realism that no postcard ever advertised.
Creator Siwan Jones wrote the part for Lloyd-Gregory after watching furniture movers vanish into a dark tunnel in Aberystwyth; she pictured two colliding worlds, the cash-strapped and the comfortably smug, and let them batter each other for sixteen fifty-minute episodes. The Welsh-language thriller pulled S4C’s biggest drama ratings of the decade, won three BAFTA Cymru awards in 2013—Best Actress for Lloyd-Gregory among them—and was twice shortlisted for Best Drama Series at the Celtic Media Festival. Strange Village’s score of echoing guitars and church-bell samples still turns up on late-night Radio Cymru playlists, proof that a lullaby can sound like a threat.
Production Details
S4C / 2 Seasons / 16 Episodes / 2011
Created by: Siwan Jones
Writer(s): Siwan Jones
Producer(s): Paul Jones
Main Cast
Shelley Rees as
Kate Jarman as
Sara Gregory as
Gareth Watkins as Heddwas
