Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Arts myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.When some men were seen behaving strangely near Seal Bay, a remote beach in west Wales in 1983, it was thought they might be poachers trying to empty the lobster pots. The men, who had been spotted by residents of the coastal village of Newport, Pembrokeshire, looked different from the usual types who came to walk the coastal path. After repeated sightings, local fisherman went to inspect the beach, which was only accessible by water. There, underneath a pile of rocks, they found a hatch, beneath which was a ladder leading to a large underground chamber.There are shades of the TV series Lost in Operation Seal Bay, a new podcast from BBC Radio Wales. Where Lost’s famous hatch revealed a bunker containing a laboratory, this one . . . well, I won’t reveal its exact contents. What I can say is that it played a pivotal part in the operations of an international smuggling ring, the activities of which were uncovered by accident.So far, Operation Seal Bay isn’t so much a whodunnit as the story of how the baddies were rumbled. The first two episodes are mostly about the local community and their first inklings that something rum was occurring. Along with the unusually fancy cars parked around the place, there were the strangers frequenting local pubs and paying with £50 notes. One woman recalls seeing “a guy dressed in a green-coloured safari suit”, which in rural parts is equivalent to wearing fancy dress. Later, thousands of pounds’ worth of maritime apparatus — outboard motors, radio equipment, huge inflatable dinghies — were discovered under tarpaulin in a cave.While it feels apt that the pace of these opening episodes is slow — a reflection of the “sleepy” village in which they are set — it can be a little frustrating, too. Eyewitnesses begin sentences with “I was literally having a bite to eat with my dad when . . . ”, while retired police officers make liberal and inadvertently comic use of the phrase “lo and behold”. Nonetheless, the story is a good one, with sophisticated criminals ultimately undone by the intrinsic nosiness of rural populations. (I was raised in one of these communities, where the garish attire of “grockles”, as outsiders were known, was an endless source of mirth in the local pub.) By the end of the second episode, the pace has picked up as two of the ringleaders — Robin Boswell, the British son of a naval officer, and a Danish actor-turned-career criminal called Soeren Berg-Arnbak — are nabbed by police. The latter, we learn, is a master of disguise, having once successfully robbed a bank by entering the building as a man and emerging dressed as a woman. Operation Seal Bay has all the makings of an enjoyable crime caper, not least because it has a quality that, for me, elevates it above its often grisly true-crime rivals: the baddies may be looking at a long stretch inside, but so far not a drop of blood has been spilled. bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0k8lckr
