Dark. Mysterious. Thrilling. Three adjectives that not only describe the new series of BBC Wales’ crime drama Hinterland, but an accurate description of being on the streets of Cardiff city centre at three in the morning, a few days before Christmas. It’s cold, it’s dark and the rain is threatening as we set up a stunt to draw attention to the Welsh noir.
So what exactly were we doing?
We wanted to do something big. Something that would grab people’s attention in our effort to get as much publicity as possible for the second series of Hinterland, which is set in Aberystwyth, starring Poldark’s Richard Harrington as DCI Mathias.
There are so many brands competing at this time of year for consumers’ attention and it’s no different for broadcasters. BBC Wales has superb dramas on TV over Christmas and we wanted to go beyond traditional promotion, take it a step further and get people talking.
We threw around ideas about recreating crime scenes to give people a mysterious experience before deciding on evidence bags. But what could we put in an evidence bag- a building? The detective’s caravan? Driving back from a meeting in rush hour traffic, the answer was staring us in the face. The crime scene in the first episode of series two is a bus.
With only three weeks to turn it around, we set about making our ambition a reality: to build a huge plastic evidence bag to fit over a bus, on location and to appear by the time the first shoppers were out on the city streets. And there were plenty of hurdles to overcome, from changes in location and fighting with the elements to breakages. But the result was amazing, and by 7am on the morning of 21 December, 2015, bemused shoppers were beginning to take photos of the bus in a bag.
And it was the real thing. This was the actual bus that used in the production as well as helping people travel to, from and around Ceredigion for the remainder of the year.
It was a very large clue leading to Hinterland, which will be on BBC One Wales in four parts from Wednesday 23 December at 9.30 and on BBC iPlayer.
