WHAT TO WATCH

DAL Y MELLT BBC iPlayer & S4C, 9pm

Adapted by Iwan Roberts from his Welsh language novel of the same name, Dal y Mellt (Catching the Lightning), there is a seductively scrappy energy about this six-part thriller which, while wildly derivative (Guy Ritchie and Quentin Tarantino are clear touchstones), remains, somehow, still distinctly itself. Released as a box set on BBC iPlayer, it follows a rogue’s gallery of outsiders and wrong ’uns across Gwynedd, Cardiff, Dublin and Soho. They are all connected by something – a heist? A murder? – which only becomes apparent as the series goes on, and first impressions invariably prove deceptive: there’s

Dyfan Roberts’s avuncular farmer with some dark secrets, Siw Hughes’s sweet old lady with a penchant for conspiracy theories, Mark Lewis Jones’s gnarled thug with a sensitive side and, above all, Gwïon Morris Jones’s Carbo, a smart-mouthed car thief drifting way out of his depth.

Light on its feet and enjoyably slippery with its plotting, Dal y Mellt makes the odd misstep (occasionally leaden dialogue and a hackneyed nightmare sequence) but with the endgame so hazy and the performances full of mischief and menace – not least the ever engaging Carbo – it is never less than intriguing. Gabriel Tate