Peter Viney's Blog

Directed by James Griffiths
Written by Tom Basden & Tim Key

Seen at Poole Lighhouse Cinema, 15 August 2025

CAST
Tim Key- Charles Heath
Tom Basden – Herb McGwyer
Carey Mulligan – Nell Mortimer
Steve Marsh- Peter
Sian Clifford- Amanda
Akemnji Ndifornyen – Michael
Luka Downie- Marcus
Kerrie Thomas – Marie

The film expands a short piece that Tom Basden and Tim Key did in 2007, also directed by James Griffiths, as The One and Only Herb McGwyer Plays Wallis Island. The irony is that the current film is about people reuniting to try and repeat an artistic endeavour years after the original success. i.e. what the three of them are doing.

Charles (Tim Key) is a major lottery winner. He is a widower, living alone in a large house on Wallis Island. His wife, Marie, had died five years earlier. They both loved the folk duo McGwyer Mortimer who were medium successful a decade earlier. They made several albums and got in the front cover of NME. Charles decides to cover Herb with money to come to Wallis Island and play a concert just for him.

The McGwyer Mortimer songs go from love affair to break up, which happened when Herb McGwyer made a solo album without telling her. Think Buckingham and Nicks in Fleetwood Mac, or The Mamas and Papas, another set of couples. Really think the Mamas and The Papas:

In a coffee house Sebastian sat
And after every number they’d pass the hat
McGuinn and McGuire just a gettin’ higher
In L.A., you know where that’s at

McGuire was Barry McGuire, who had started out in the folkie New Christy Minstrels and was composer of the 60s anthem Eve of Destruction. Even more, Herb McGwyer isn’t his real name, it’s Chris Pinner (just as Ewan McColl was really Jimmy Miller).

I digress, but the film is full of little references, such as Herb suggesting Charles could try Fleetwood Mac (Ah! Buckingham and Nicks!) next time. So Herb is invited to the island, and goes through a series of comic minor disasters, while the exuberant Charles spouts continuous verbal diarrhoea.

What Herb doesn’t know is that Nell Mortimer (Carey Mulligan)has been invited too. Charles wants a reunion show. Nell turns up with her American husband Michael. They live in Portland, Oregon where Nell makes chutney for the farmers’ market. There is animosity. I’m not going into plot spoilers, but for starters Herb is being paid more than Nell, and there are arguments about who wrote what. Michael and Nell are derisive about Herb’s efforts to become a pop star after the split. Michael goes off bird watching overnight and Herb realises he is still smitten with Nell.

It is a gem of a film. Basically the cast is just five. Add Amanda who runs the island shop with the running joke that she stocks nothing of what Herb and Nell want. After soaking his iPhone Herb wants some rice to dry it out. Amanda only has a tin of creamed pudding rice. The sub plot is Herb and Nell trying to get the diffident Charles and Amanda together. Where it wins is the songs are very good, the scenery is spectacular and the three main actors are obviously so used to working together. Of course, an added irony is that they have a major star, Carey Mulligan, in their film. Just like Charles has Herb to stay.

It’s a winner. The most obvious sentimental ending is eschewed too. It’s a perfect DVD / streaming film. The right length, funny, poignant, sounds great.

I watched all of it thinking it must be Scotland where they have so many remote islands, accent not being an issue as the principle actors are all English. It’s not. It’s West Wales, Pembrokeshire and the island is Ramsey Island near St Davids (Britain’s smallest city – it qualifies as a city as it has a cathedral). Ramsey Island is an assiduously protected bird sanctuary just a kilometre off the coast, and much smaller than the fictional “Wallis Island” where Michael sets off in a Land Rover tour to the ‘north of the island’ which will be overnight – though bird watchers do start just before dawn. Most of it was filmed on the Pembrokeshire coast not on the island, and I kick myself for not knowing that. Friends moved to right where it was filmed and we visited them at least three times AND my great grandad was from there. I looked up Ramsey Island, and I think “the shop” looks like the house on Ramsey Island.

The other thing is main filming was done in just eighteen days. That is very fast for feature film, except for late 60s Elvis Presley films. Our ELT video series usually took ten to eleven days for 60 minutes and that is really fast, and meant long days too. I guess the actors knew each other, they wrote the script themselves, and locations are limited. They have enough interiors to make extra work after dark possible. I assume the lovely shots of seabirds and cliffs were not ‘main’ filming and were picked up separately. The “concert” at the end was filmed as one event on one evening, they ran three hours of film and edited.

Soundtrack

The soundtrack is credited to the fictional duo McGwyer and Mortimer, though in the CD player it comes up as Tom Basden and Carey Mulligan. Tom Basden plays guitar and takes lead vocal. Carey Mulligan sings with him. They add Emma Smith on violin, and all other instruments are the producer Adam IIlhan. There is a lovely ambient music in the film too, which he composed.

Carey Mulligan should know the part being married to Marcus Mumford and singing in Inside Llewyn Davis and singing Let No Man Steal Your Thyme in Far From The Madding Crowd.