Review
Happy Valley, episode 3, review: how to win a Bafta over a cup of tea and a sandwich
Sarah Lancashire and Siobhan Finneran are majestic in a scene set in a Sheffield cafe, proving that Sally Wainwright is a master at work
I have to admit to a touch of Northern bias in my love for Happy Valley (BBC One). Or West Yorkshire bias, to be specific. Of course you don’t have to be from this part of the world to appreciate the series. But as a local I can tell you that it captures the Calder Valley so perfectly: the landscape, the streets, the mordant humour.
Episode three picked up where episode two left off: Sgt Catherine Cawood (Sarah Lancashire) confronting her sister, Clare (Siobhan Finneran), in a Sheffield cafe. It was another tour-de-force performance from Lancashire, barely suppressing her rage at Clare’s betrayal. When Lancashire gets her latest Bafta – you heard it here first – this is the clip they should play.
Clare has been taking Catherine’s grandson, Ryan, to see his father, Tommy Lee Royce, in prison. She is kind-hearted but dim. Perhaps the meetings would make Royce a nicer person, she suggested, and Catherine could find a way to forgive him? But Catherine knows a psychopath when she sees one. Writer Sally Wainwright reminds us throughout that Catherine is no superwoman. She’s tough – witness her walloping a suspect who has just given her a bloody nose – but not unshakeable. She is still grieving for her daughter. Those maternal feelings have transferred to her grandson.
There was another great scene on Clare’s doorstep, in which Catherine tried to speak to Ryan about his dad. Ryan, a typical teenager, complained that his tea was getting cold; Catherine interrupted her speech to ask what he was having. “Stew,” he said. “Oh, it’ll be all right,” she assured him. It was a tiny domestic detail that fit beautifully into the whole.
Rhys Connah has played Ryan since he was a young boy in series one. It is often the case that child actors fail to develop into convincing adolescent ones, but Connah is clearly a natural and delivers the right blend of bravado, stroppiness and vulnerability. He is a motherless boy who wants a relationship with his dad, and can’t see that he’s being manipulated.
When dodgy pharmacist Faisal snapped and attacked Joanna after discovering she had lied to him, it slightly stretched credulity – although he’s desperate, would he really lose control and resort to violence like that? But Wainwright has resisted the easy route of making Joanna a saintly victim. The character deserves our sympathy for being horribly abused by her controlling husband, but she is also unlikeable. It takes a confident writer to do that.