This week, ITV will be airing a brand-new drama: the thriller Out There.
Starring Martin Clunes as Welsh farmer Nathan Williams, the show tells the story of the slow creep of drug trafficking into the community he lives in. As things spiral – and Nathan’s son Johnny gets sucked into the trafficking scene thanks to his old friend Rhys – things become ever more dangerous, and Nathan decides to take action.
It’s a tense premise, and the trailer promises its fair share of violence.
But is it true? Here’s what we know.
Is it based on a true story?
The story itself is fictional: neither Nathan nor his son Johnny (or any of the supporting characters) exist in the real world.
However, the story it’s based on – of county lines drug trafficking – is all too real. This is where drug dealers move out from the cities and bring their products to rural towns and villages in order to sell them. They also often convince locals to ‘help’ them, often suckering them in with money, and then keeping them in line with threats of violence.
In 2018, a BBC Wales investigation found that there were over 1,000 county lines drug networks across the UK – a fourfold increase over the previous four years – which recruited children as young as 13 to sell and traffic drugs across the UK.
"This is how it works," a police officer from Rhyl told the BBC at the time. "The drug runners arriving in small towns give customers an untraceable mobile phone number with its own brand name - this is the county line number.
"The key is this mobile number is held back in the city by an anonymous dealer. They have no obvious contact with the drugs but have total control over what is being sold and when."
Using that phone, customers will order drugs that will then be delivered by a network of ‘runners’ – often vulnerable people or young people. And where drugs go, violence often follows: many runners and dealers have been stabbed to death in wars over turf in recent years.
What has the team said about it?
The cast and crew of Out There did a lot of research into the show to try and tell the story of what was happening in an authentic way.
"We spoke a lot to the police about how they tackle it, because it’s a relatively new phenomenon, it only really emerged in sort of 2016, 2017,” writer Ed Whitmore said at a recent Q&A for the show.
"And then we got in touch with some charities and spoke to the people who'd been involved with county lines, who'd got out of it. We tried to get a really sort of 360 degree understanding of something that is relatively new.”
He went onto add that when they were researching the show, they got talking to a police officer in Brighton, “who told us that the first they heard about it was somebody getting killed in Brighton, and they couldn't identify them. They were shot in the street, and then it turned out they were actually from Tottenham.
"And he said it was like waking up and the whole world had been turned upside down. It's like, 'Why are people from Tottenham dying in Brighton?' And for them, that was an eye-opening moment when they understood what they were dealing with."
Mark Lewis Jones, who plays Nathan’s brother Caleb, also shared his memories of filming the show in Llandovery, in Carmarthenshire, and speaking to the landlady of a local pub about the problem.
"She said that the drug problem in the town is so bad now that she's considering giving up," he said. "I think the scale of it was so shocking to me. I kind of knew about county lines, but thought it was places like Cambridge, sort of satellite towns around big cities.
"I didn't realise that it was so rife in small rural areas, and that it wasn't just a drug problem, that it was destroying communities like the one you see in the story."
Out There starts on ITV from Sunday January 19
