There’s nothing like a trip to the Pennines to lift your spirits – the bracing air, the jawdropping views, the disturbing contemporary drama. Happy Valley’s second series premieres on BBC1 next week, signalling a welcome return for one of the shows of 2014. The shocking tale of abduction, betrayal and a mother’s grief was a thunderous watch – alarmingly violent but authentically unmissable. Starring Sarah Lancashire as uncompromising police sergeant Catherine Cawood, it showed the north as a hilly hellhole where the good perish and the wicked triumph.
It’s no surprise we lapped it up. Melancholy runs deep in the UK: after all, this is the country that gave us Threads, Boys from the Blackstuff and the traditional EastEnders Christmas traumafest. More recently, we consumed the child murder of Broadchurch, sat rapt during the spree killing of Southcliffe and chomped popcorn to the ocular torture and impending apocalypse of Utopia. In Britain, at least, misery always finds company.
Nonetheless, creator and writer Sally Wainwright thinks she may have got the Happy Valley balance wrong. “I wanted the whole series to be funnier,” she has said, voicing her intention to mix in more comic scenes in series two. It seems an odd admission: when you have won the best drama Bafta, got good ratings and universal critical acclaim, why tinker with the formula? Altering a show as confident as Happy Valley risks diluting what made it great in the first place. For some fans, there just ain’t no valley low enough.
But Wainwright wasn’t always the blackhearted monster of Happy Valley. She made her TV bones at the Emmerdale and Coronation Street coalfaces (as good a foundation in character, storytelling and subtle humour as you’ll get). At Home with the Braithwaites showed her comedy writing chops, which she developed further on Last Tango in Halifax, her romantic comedy that dealt with elderly love, class and gay marriage with an assured light touch. You would never guess it if you arrived late to her work, but the first episodes of Last Tango were accused of being (the horror!) twee.
Scott and Bailey (a show that was no stranger to bleak subject matter) had terrifically funny dialogue, too. If you grew up around working-class women, you’ll hear the ring of authenticity in the exchanges between Godzilla Murray, Slap Dodson and Scary Mary – the content abusive, the subtext affectionate. At her best, Wainwright calls to mind Jimmy McGovern. That ability to extract humour from horror you see in Cracker and The Lakes runs right through Scott and Bailey.
In Happy Valley, we left Sergeant Cawood battered but ultimately vindicated by the events of series one. Catherine is the latest of Wainwright’s flawed but compelling women on whom she has made her name. Rachel Bailey was the brilliant detective whose inability to detect the deadbeats in her personal life was unsurpassed; Gill Murray was the career overachiever but in-denial problem drinker; Catherine is teak-tough but reckless and impulsive. One way or another, she has a habit of finding trouble.
Well, that’s Trouble Town for you and nobody would want to remove Happy Valley’s essential danger and doom. But as great as series one was, it was tough to stomach with the gruesome killings, sexual violence and abject despair. A little sunlight bursting through the gloom in Calder Valley won’t hurt – and making it more palatable to a wider audience gives it a better shot at long-term survival.
Happy Valley is on BBC1 at 9pm on Tuesday 9 February.
