I love Happy Valley. It makes Line of Duty look like a cartoon

Sarah Lancashire in Happy Valley

BBC

There’s an awful lot going on in Happy Valley, most of which is not jolly. At heart, though, it’s basically an illustration of the great truth frequently pressed upon me by friends that there is not a problem nor a tricky situation that would not be best handled by a doughty woman in late middle-age who simply can’t be doing with your nonsense.

Here, that woman is of course Sarah Lancashire’s Catherine Cawood. She rolls her eyes, she never flaps — she’s seen it all. We’re in the mill towns of Yorkshire, in the Calder Valley, but the distance from the big city smoke is never used to sneer, as it was in, say, Broadchurch. Nor is it fetishised, True Detective-style. Instead, we have all the challenges of any inner-city sink estate, every bit as vicious and terrifying, but with hills and cobbles and people saying, “How do?” It is not All Criminals Great And Small and it makes Line of Duty look like a cartoon.

The second fixed point is James Norton’s Tommy Lee Royce, still in jail after committing a string of crimes that included several murders and, of course, the rape that led to the birth of Cawood’s grandson. Norton, so often cast as one or another type of toff, is at his very best here as anything but. Now all hairy and with grim, weeping stitches, he dominates every shot, terrifyingly taut, but capable of sickening intimacies. Invited to sit by his lawyer, he presses against him on a prison bench, far too close. It’s beautifully, horribly, done.

Royce has confessed in prison to being an accomplice to the dumping of the body in the reservoir, and seems to have dropped his St Christopher necklace in there too, because psychopathic magnetism doesn’t stop you being dim, I guess. Yet the name for the killer that he gives to the police is not the one they are expecting.

Cawood’s grandson, Ryan, is a teenager now and being picked on at school by a PE teacher. That same teacher — Mark Stanley’s Rob — has a wife addicted to prescription drugs, and he abuses her. He’s also put a lock on the fridge, which is the most PE teacher thing ever. Cawood arrests the wife (Mollie Winnard) and sees her bruises — she has her eye on Rob. Her worries about Ryan, though, don’t end with his football coach. She’s also coming to suspect that he has been visiting Royce, his biological father, in prison. Meanwhile, the guy selling the drugs, a chemist, has his own problems.

● Carol Midgley reviews Happy Valley

The essential grimness of Happy Valley — for example, that it centres on a child of rape whose mother died by suicide — ought to make every bit of this show a difficult watch. That it isn’t (except for when it wants to be) is wholly down to the Wainwright/Lancashire collaboration that is Cawood. When not stoically fixing the world, one evil walloper at a time, she’s sitting in her back garden drinking tea with her sister (Siobhan Finneran). She’s bought a Land Rover and plans to do it up and drive to the Himalayas. I hope she gets there, and I hope we get to see it too. Can you imagine? Sighing, solving, mending and taking no shit at all, right to the ends of the Earth.

Keeley Hawes, Matthew Macfadyen and Emer Heatley in Stonehouse

ITV

Stonehouse was fun, but I feel it should have been more than fun. Matthew Macfadyen played John Stonehouse, the Labour MP who faked his death in the 1970s. He played him very well too, even if he did look unsettlingly like George Osborne. Yet throughout this three-parter I couldn’t quite figure out what it was trying to tell us — and if it was telling us nothing, then why not?

Really, there were two things that made Stonehouse’s story worth telling. The first was his disappearance. Leaving a pile of folded clothes on a beach in Miami, he swam out to sea, then quietly swam back and flew to Australia on a passport he had taken out in the name of a dead constituent. This is a mad and wonderful farce, obviously, but he lasted in Australia for only about a month before he was nicked for fraud.

The second amazing aspect of Stonehouse’s story is his rumoured past as a spy for Communist Czechoslovakia. The problem with that, though, is that not much is known about it because it might not have happened. Here it was played very nicely for laughs as we saw him seduced, then quite willingly blackmailed. “Would I be paid?” he asks. “You are the worst spy I have ever come across,” his handler says, and he hangs his head. Then, when they threatened to cut off his money, he was aghast. “But I have three children at expensive public schools,” he said. There were a lot of similarly nice lines, such as when, after he crashed out of government, his secretary (Emer Heatley), who was also inevitably his mistress, tried to reassure him by invoking the memory of Winston Churchill’s comeback. “But that took ten years and a world war,” he raged. And so on.

All of this was very funny, so no complaints there. That camply satirical tone, though, deprived the whole thing of higher meaning. That was avoidable, and it’s worth noting that Stonehouse was scripted by John Preston, who wrote the book that inspired A Very English Scandal (the Hugh Grant/Jeremy Thorpe one) in which satire and tragedy rubbed along just fine. Here, though, the steel never came. Keeley Hawes as Stonehouse’s wife, Barbara — wasted in the first episode, but given far more heft later on — came the closest to producing it, reminding her husband that he let his family think he was dead, for God’s sake, and there had to be a reason.

Macfadyen did well to capture that brittle, sock-suspenders-in-bed, right-on-the-edge-of-madness sense that so many men in public life used to carry, but reason came there none. Towards the end, after Stonehouse had been dragged back home, he claimed that it had all been about the pressures of public life and his inability to cope.

Kevin McNally’s Harold Wilson clearly agreed with him, saying, “Quite right,” before stepping down. But were we supposed to too? Or was the guy just a fraudster and a charlatan? This could have been the story of an outwardly perfect person coming apart beneath that lacquered establishment façade that has protected generations of empty mediocrities. Instead, it was the tale of a floundering tosspot, only unnoticed because he was living in a Westminster version of Abigail’s Party where everyone else was a floundering tosspot too. Like I said, it was all very good fun. But I don’t think I understand the man any better.

Kaleidoscope, finally, is a fascinating idea. I haven’t reached the end yet, because it’s more than six hours long and it’s the week after new year and I’ve still got a lot of cheese to eat alongside all these runs I’ve resolved to take and new languages I’m supposed to be learning, and, what, does time grow on trees for you people? So it’s possible that what follows may be badly wrong. But I don’t think so.

Plotwise, it’s a fairly conventional heist story. Like Ocean’s Eleven or, well, anything else. Giancarlo Esposito leads the gang, looking very different from the Gus Fring you’ll remember from Breaking Bad et al. Rufus Sewell is the top banker on the other side. No character, including theirs, is particularly original, but given that shows like this are all about comfort and familiarity, why should they be?

● James Jackson on Kaleidoscope: I want to watch telly, not make my own

The point of Kaleidoscope is that you’re supposed to be able to watch it in any order, right up until the finale. Think Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, or William S Burroughs, who supposedly chopped up Naked Lunch and mixed the chapters up at random. What this means in practice is that something you’d regard as character development one way round becomes character reinforcement another way round. Relationships can evolve or clarify. Seen in one direction, a character is shot in the hand early on and thereafter wears a bandage. Seen in another, the bandage is a mystery you wait to have solved.

Presumably, this was all quite hard to put together. I watched a few episodes on my own, then another with my wife, and it was undeniably interesting trying to comprehend how people or plotlines about which I already knew were appearing to her. This is clever, but not that clever because the story doesn’t actually change. And the danger, I suppose, is that you end up thinking not that what you have just seen is terribly clever, but rather that this whole, quite tired howdunnit genre is in fact covertly stupid.

Maybe they are all like this. Maybe there has never been a heist drama where the sequence of events mattered at all. Just a bunch of tricks, one after the other. Watch them backwards, watch them sideways, watch them with your eyes closed. We’ve been had.