Noel Williams

Maureen has her hands full at home and can't take care of her father William, who may be suffering from Alzheimer's. Her brothers - Alun, an alcoholic trumpet player, and John, an insensitive businessman - don't really want to help. William, a lifelong socialist, feels angry and resentful towards the British government which has abandoned him in his old age. Having been persuaded by his children to buy a council house in the booming 80s, he discovers that this selfsame government, which made such a virtue of home ownership some ten years earlier, now expects him to sell the property in order to pay for his care. Isolated in old age, Williams secretly decides to put into action a plan to get back at the system.

On his ninth birthday, young Gwyn (Osian Roberts), who lives on a remote hill farm in Wales, receives five strange gifts from his grandmother (Siân Phillips): a piece of seaweed, a yellow scarf, a tin whistle, a metal brooch and a small broken horse. Gwyn offers the brooch to the wind and receives back a tiny silvery spider - Arianwen, the snow spider - confirming that, as his grandmother had already guessed, he has inherited magical powers from his Celtic ancestor Gwydyon, a powerful magician whose exploits are described in the fourth book ("Math Son of Mathonwy") of the Mabinogion. With the help of the snow spider, Gwyn embarks on adventures involving other worlds of snow and silver, as he attempts to solve the five-year-old mystery of his sister Beth's disappearance in a snow storm.

"The Sherman Plays" is a series of television adaptations of plays originally staged at the Sherman Theatre in Cardiff. The series, produced by HTV, ran from 1993 to 1997. It featured a variety of dramas, some of which were specifically written for the series.