In My Skin

In My Skin is a darkly comic coming of age story that follows the double life led by 16-year-old Bethan Gwyndaf. To her school friends, she portrays herself as an ordinary, cocky teen, full of confidence. The reality, however, is a different story.

Set in Cardiff, it shows Bethan dealing with a troubled life at home that sees her bipolar mother Katrina sectioned by the crisis team at a psychiatric hospital. Her alcoholic father displays a lack of compassion to the situation, and Bethan fights hard to hide the truth of the life she really leads from her best friends, Travis and Lydia, and her teachers.

There's heartache, laughs, and shame as Bethan handles the complexities of going through puberty, and of everyday school life. The respect of her peers and of her teacher Ms Morgan for her writing is something Bethan secretly desires. Can she break out of her shell and use some of the heartache and pain to accomplish that?

Writer Kayleigh Llewellyn says: "In My Skin is a coming of age story set in Cardiff, told through the eyes of a teen girl, Bethan - portrayed exquisitely by Gabrielle Creevy. The show is a reflection on my teen years - a time when I felt deep shame to be from an underclass Welsh family that was living with mental illness. My mum has bipolar disorder and when I was growing up would frequently be sectioned for long spells in a mental hospital based minutes away from my school. I lived in fear that my friends would find out, that they would judge us, that I'd be ostracised. It's only now, in writing my story 15 years later, that I've realised just how many other people are living through similar situations. Mental illness affects so many lives and yet it's still so surrounded by stigma. I wish I could go back in time and tell my teenage self that she didn't need to hide. But since I don't have a time machine, I thought I'd write a TV show and tell everyone else instead..."