Happy Valley
BBC1
★★★★★
If there was better dialogue in the opening five minutes of a TV drama in 2022 than in the first part of Happy Valley last night, please, submit your nominations. Because the sarky exchange between police officer Catherine Cawood (Sarah Lancashire) and her condescending, mansplaining senior (Vincent Franklin) over a dismembered skeleton in a reservoir was top-notch. His smirking, rude dismissal of her experience and expertise in being able to identify the dead man on sight teed up her walking away, saying: “I’ll leave it with you. Twats.”
It is a treat to have the whole Happy Valley charabanc back after a seven-year absence and in all its dark glory. And not just because of Lancashire, who does this gig so brilliantly, but, obviously, James Norton, as the mesmerising psychopath Tommy Lee Royce.
The last time we saw Tommy he had a virtual skinhead. Now, with his long locks and still in prison, he seems to be channelling a hybrid look of Charles Manson and Jesus Christ. The crude stitches on his forehead from when he was attacked by another inmate could pass for a crown of thorns. Plus he appears to have been “chatty” with the prison chaplain lately. Has he found God? Or is he pretending, to manipulate the system? Given that he’s a murdering, rapist scumbag (but one I could watch all day), I’d go with the latter.
Norton has said that he has had women slapping him in the street, so much did Tommy Lee Royce’s menace chill the audience’s blood. Of the many roles he has played I’d nominate this as his best, although we haven’t seen enough of him yet for my liking. It’s the gentle voice that does it. A monster with an Alan Bennett lilt.
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The quality of Happy Valley rarely dips, and Sally Wainwright has returned with a cracking subplot about domestic violence and a foul, coercive controlling PE teacher, Mr Hepworth (Mark Stanley), who padlocks the fridge and beats his wife, Jo (Mollie Winnard), who is addicted to diazepam, and I don’t blame her. The scene in which Hepworth stripped his wife in the bedroom then reported her to the police while his children trembled was a difficult watch.
The way it dovetails so neatly with the dodgy pharmacist Faisal (Amit Shah), who is supplying Jo with the drugs and getting payment in the bedroom, is Wainwright at her best — showing the complicated, bleak misery being played out in “respectable” homes. Why didn’t Jo ask for police help when arrested? Is she too terrified? Or too dependent on the drugs to think straight?
Now we have the added twist that Ryan, Catherine’s grandson from the daughter who killed herself after being raped by Tommy Lee Royce, has been secretly visiting Psycho Dad in prison. With the help of a couple whose identity will be revealed in the next episode. And just when Catherine’s life finally seemed peaceful; she is months from retirement and no longer feels the need to hitch herself to the “first useless, flaky twat of a man who ’appens along”.
It’s a mark of a drama’s class that so many years can pass and yet when it picks up it is seamless, as if it has never been away. This is the best misery TV money can buy.
