“Our Catherine had an exciting day at work today,” says her sister Claire, making polite conversation. “She found a dead body.” It’s the little things in a job that make it worthwhile: friendly colleagues, a ready supply of name-brand instant coffee, grand-scale stationery theft etc. Finding a putrefying corpse in a lock-up might not feature on most people’s list of job satisfaction criteria, but things are different in Happy Valley (Tuesday, 9pm, BBC1).
The BBC drama – whose first series gripped viewers when it aired in 2014, and which went on to win Baftas before being adopted by Netflix for the subtitled enjoyment of US audiences – brings into focus the unique problems troubling the grandmothers/police sergeants of northern England. For Catherine Cawood (Sarah Lancashire), these problems are as varied as a dead daughter; a behaviourally challenged grandson resulting from said dead daughter’s brutal rape; a recovering heroin-addict sister; and the uphill struggle of ridding a Yorkshire town of the drug dealers, crooks and bastards that inhabit it. It is fair to say that Cawood doesn’t have it easy. Series one saw her not only endure personal ordeals, but rescue the victim of a botched kidnapping planned by Royston Vasey’s finest (Steve Pemberton to you and me), tighten the net on evil Tommy Lee Royce (James Norton, whose cheekbones are also to be found in War And Peace), and find her grandson in peril on a barge.
Now, the second series is here, Tommy is locked up and Pemberton’s sinister dimples are nowhere to be seen. This doesn’t mean life is any merrier. The first problem facing Calderdale is sheep-rustling Happy Valley – filmed around Hebden Bridge, with its beautiful stone houses straight off the pages of the Guardian’s Lets Move To – may be filled with rolling hills and verdant pastures, but the reality of rural issues are harsh. This cattle-twocking, according to Cawood, is “sheep-rustling, north Halifax style. One sheep and three lads off their heads on acid”. In other words, poor Lamb Chop is mutilated, highly distressed and has to be put out of its misery with a rock.
To me, the daily struggle faced by beleaguered middle-aged women such as Catherine is summed up in one exchange with a farmer – another beleaguered middle-aged woman, FYI – moments before Catherine has to bash the sheep’s brains out. “Do you take sugar?” the farmer asks, firm in the knowledge that a cuppa soothes all, including but not limited to ovine mercy killings. “Two please… no, one,” replies Catherine. There is a toughness in these women which no one, not you, not me, not no one truly understands. A toughness that comes from balancing the infinite and minute stresses of their lives with the tyrannical calculus of the Weight Watchers calorie system. Some might see this as the sort of frivolity that sets women-oriented drama back, but I know different. I know that this is the backbone of drama gold, and that – by the by – it’s this is the same myopic attitude that prevents soap operas being accepted as one of the biggest cultural treasures we possess. You can imagine therefore how thrilled I was when Katherine Kelly – the former Becky Granger in Corrie, who spent six years wailing mournfully then angrily then mournfully again on the cobbles – turns up here as the stony-faced DI Shackleton.
Elsewhere, there are scorned women, extra-marital affairs, plots about a potential serial killer, and the fleshing out of some of Catherine and Claire’s backstory. Claire, for fans of perpetual suffering, has found herself a potential fancy man whose own story arc, judging by the way he sweats nervously whenever Catherine’s warrant card comes out, will probably come right back to the mutilated sheep. Catherine can’t get bogged down in that, though. She has to deliver sandwiches, hot tea and a word of warning to the village’s street prostitutes, get a load of washing on and somehow, some way, swerve Shackleton’s Medusa-with-cramps glare. A woman’s work is never done.
