Some shows are highly anticipated, others passionately longed for. The return of Sally Wainwright’s magnificent Happy Valley, seven years after the last series screened, is an event I thought would never happen. Didn’t Sarah Lancashire say her role as Sergeant Catherine Cawood had taken too high a toll on her? But still I pined for it. Lancashire’s marvellous performance aside, its excitements are so much richer and deeper than those of its nearest rivals – it is a family/small town saga as much as it is a police procedural – and I adore its sense of place. The singular topography of the part of West Yorkshire in which it is set is as important to the way it works as its closely drawn characters. The houses in Happy Valley, built of local sandstone, induce in me an ache that is close to homesickness. The terrace I grew up in looked just like them, smoke and the decades having turned its exterior, too, to the colour of burned toast.
Seven years is a long time, and part of me wishes I’d watched the first two series again before this one began. But while Cawood is now only months from retirement – she has bought an old Land Rover in which she plans to drive to the Himalayas – her life for the moment remains recognisably the same, each day bringing with it that unrelenting combination of warmth and grind that accounts for her unnatural stoicism, the sense we have of her invincibility. Those around her are doing OK. Her grandson, Ryan (Rhys Connah), is 16 and, though a terrible goalie, seems to be happy. Her sister, Clare (Siobhan Finneran), is still sober, and still seeing Neil (Con O’Neill). And Tommy Lee Royce (James Norton), the man she blames for the death of her daughter, Becky, and who is Ryan’s biological father, is still safely in prison.
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