‘I’m just becoming the person I’ve always wanted to be,” says Sarah Lancashire’s character, police officer Sgt Catherine Cawood, in the comeback episode of Happy Valley. “I don’t take shit off anyone any more. I say it like it is, I know who I am. Finally.”
After nearly seven years away, one of the best TV dramas of the 21st century is back. Sally Wainwright’s crime thriller, family saga and state-of-the-nation address all in one is returning to BBC One for its third and unequivocally final season. The first two series of the heroic Sgt Cawood’s attempt to clean up the streets of Hebden Bridge while keeping her troubled personal life on track saw it win big at the Baftas – largely thanks to Wainwright’s genius for blending humour with a gut-punch portrayal of how drugs and poverty have ravaged a West Yorkshire town. It has earned cult status and critical acclaim in the US too, making Lancashire a star. One of last year’s biggest shows, Mare of Easttown, was a small-town crime saga so heavily influenced by Happy Valley it was almost a remake.
“Post-40, I found I stopped worrying about things I used to, like what people thought of me,” says Wainwright. It’s an experience she has channelled into Catherine, a grandmother who faces down organised criminals, petty thugs and serial murderers armed only with the empathy and nous she’s got from experience. “I’ve had that conversation with a lot of women. They get to a certain age where they can be confident about who they are, confident about their work, confident about their place with other people.”
The new series opens with Catherine discovering a murder victim and gleaning all the facts about who they are and when they died before two male superiors arrive. Brushing off their condescension, she fills them in and saunters off, muttering “Twats”. She’s flying. “Catherine’s the happiest we’ve ever seen her,” says Wainwright. “Time’s moved on. Things haven’t got any worse … ”
But they’re about to, of course. Catherine has a nemesis, named Tommy Lee Royce: a rapist and multiple murderer, the looming evil she can never escape because he’s the father of Catherine’s cherished grandson and ward, Ryan. Last time we saw him, Tommy (played by James Norton) was causing havoc remotely, from prison – you can bet he won’t stay there for long in the final run, which means Catherine’s greatest fear, that Tommy might reconnect with and corrupt Ryan, is revived. But for now, despite sporting a startling new look – the old buzzcut and razor jaw have made way for long, lank hair and a hippyish beard – he’s still inside.
In reality, his prison is a bare, echoey holding cell in Bolton’s disused courthouse – which I visit to talk to Norton during a break in filming. As he sits in his green-and-yellow prisoner’s jumpsuit, it’s hard not to feel deeply uneasy at being stuck in a room with him.
“Sally decided she wants him to look like Jesus,” says Norton, whose terrifying portrayal kickstarted his TV career in 2014. “He has a Jesus complex. He hasn’t found God but he has a calm groundedness that feels different. We assume he’s found a certain kind of authority in the prison hierarchy.”
The brilliance of Norton’s performance has always stemmed from the assured stillness he gives Tommy, which only adds to the viciousness. “James was a lot calmer than the others,” says Wainwright, recalling the auditions where the virtually unknown Norton won out over 20 competitors. “He didn’t make him a baddie as such, he was quite quiet. There’s something very disturbing about that. It made him seem more controlled than somebody who’s just a bad person.”
In the time Happy Valley has been away, the two lead characters have evolved. Crucially, Ryan – still played by Rhys Connah – has become a 16-year-old who makes his own decisions and might get them badly wrong. Wainwright always intended to leave a gap between seasons two and three, though the hiatus has been extended by her other commitments (“Gentleman Jack takes me twice as long to write as anything else!”) and by Covid.
The pandemic hasn’t made life much worse in the Hebden Bridge we see on screen. Covid is not acknowledged in the new season, perhaps because, while Britain generally has deteriorated over the last few years, the social issues tackled by Happy Valley were there already. This is a community that never recovered from the loss of its traditional industries.
When Happy Valley was conceived, the main influence – apart from 80s cop show Juliet Bravo, and the BBC’s plea to Wainwright to make a female-driven crime series for them – was Jez Lewis’s 2009 documentary Shed Your Tears and Walk Away, a pained chronicle of addiction, unemployment and suicide in Hebden Bridge. “The whole community has been priced out of the sunny side of the valley,” says Norton, who, along with the rest of the cast, was sent the film by Wainwright before production began. “It’s caused this undercurrent of despondency.”
The feeling that something horrific might be happening behind any window in the town is to the fore in the opener, which focuses on the local drug trade and, in a deeply distressing scene, coercive control and domestic abuse. Happy Valley looks set to return to the stark, queasily realistic portrayal of violence, including against women, that characterised its debut. “We’re so used to seeing violence on television,” says Wainwright. “And I don’t like it any more than anyone else. I find it becomes offensive because it’s so banal. People get beaten up, stand up again and hit someone else. I don’t like that. I hate it. That first season where Catherine got beaten up – she gets beaten up in this season as well, actually. It’s not quite as bad, but she certainly gets knocked around – what I think was different about it was we showed the consequences. Catherine had her spleen removed. She was depressed. We dealt with it really responsibly, and I don’t regret doing it. I wanted it to feel real and messy and horrible.”
For Norton, the brutality has been the hardest part of portraying Royce. “[People ask] is it hard to leave behind the character?” he says, his crisp vowels pinging off the old stone walls of the cell. “Generally I just go to the pub and have a drink with the cast. But the one thing I do remember from the first series, which did stay with me because it was disconcerting: I had really violent dreams. It wasn’t a pleasant experience.”
Happy Valley’s harshest realities are made either easier or even harder to bear by the tender, comical asides during which we catch up with Cawood’s home life. Season three keeps the joyous scenes in which Sarah Lancashire and Siobhan Finneran, as Catherine’s recovering-addict sister Clare, sit outside their back door, drinking tea and righting wrongs. “Sarah and I used to joke that Clare is Catherine’s husband,” says Finneran. “Not only are they sisters but they’re also partners, they support each other. The show’s about Catherine, how she’s getting on, how she’s getting through every day. It’s having a look at somebody else and seeing how, no matter what she’s having thrown at her, she survives.
“Sometimes,” adds Finneran, “you get a script and think: ‘It’s great but there’s a couple of bits here that don’t really make sense, or don’t seem to want to come out of my mouth the way they’ve been written.’ I don’t think I’ve ever thought that about any of Sally’s scripts. She writes the way people speak. That’s not easy to do.”
Norton agrees: “Sally’s writing is at its best when you have two people sitting at the kitchen table. I always come back to family: Catherine and Tommy’s inextricable link is they love this boy. It’s all about blood. That’s why it translates so well across the world.”
Happy Valley’s global fandom definitely isn’t getting another season after this one: Wainwright and Lancashire have agreed that the third is the last. “She knows when enough is enough,” says Wainwright. “So we planned it as a three-parter and I’m really pleased we stuck to that. You know, with some shows it’s like: [gasp] is it the last one? Then they end on a dumb, nonsense cliffhanger. But this is very clearly the end of the story.” That means you should brace yourself for Happy Valley’s toughest scenes yet but, given the show’s track record, the chances of it delivering anything other than the perfect ending are remote.
Happy Valley is on BBC One at 9pm on New Year’s Day.
