HOW CAN SO MANY WOMEN FANCY TOMMY THE RAPIST?
I‘M a huge Happy Valley fan, and I’ll admit, last week I sat on the edge of my sofa in eager anticipation to see how the brilliant writer Sally Wainwright would bring to a close the most complex and thought-provoking relationship ever seen between two characters in a drama — that between Sergeant Catherine Cawood and Tommy Lee Royce, the man behind the suicide of her daughter.
I still shake thinking of that final encounter in Catherine’s kitchen. I’m also asking myself why I and so many other women either found Tommy irresistibly attractive or, in my case, terribly sad.
A friend sent a message: ‘OK... so a psychopath moves me to tears !!!!! What a scene . . . Stunning. I am exhausted and wrung out.’
By rights, every woman who became as hooked on all three series of the show as I did, should have hated Tommy.
We know that kind of man is no figment of a writer’s imagination. We read day in, day out of the men who rape women, display unspeakable cruelty towards them, then lie and cheat to escape discovery and punishment.
Tommy raped and impregnated Catherine’s teenage daughter Becky, leaving her traumatised and depressed with a baby son to look after. She took her own life.
As a result, Catherine’s life was ruined, too. Her grief haunted her. Her husband and son couldn’t bear the misery caused by a despicable man. They could not support Catherine’s decision to raise her daughter’s child, Ryan, as they were anxious he might have inherited his father’s evil.
Catherine struggled on, firm in the belief it was not the son’s fault that he had been conceived in such a wicked manner and left without a mother.
At every turn, Tommy showed himself to be the worst kind of man imaginable.
At the end of the first series he lured his son, aged eight, into a narrowboat, doused him in petrol and would, no doubt, have taken him with him in a huge conflagration had Catherine not intervened.
In prison during the second series, Tommy persuades women to visit him, claims to love them, gets engaged to several and finds one of his admirers is ready to set herself up as a teaching assistant in Ryan’s school to enable contact between father and son.
Is there something inherently attractive about a bad boy that makes women feel drawn to convicted killers?
It’s not an uncommon phenomenon in real life, so maybe it’s a latent longing for some women, who feel they can seduce a bad man and turn him around. (They can’t, by the way.)
But women posted on social media in their droves saying they found Tommy, the character, sexy in ‘his little grey prison joggers’ or, as another wrote, ‘Tommy Lee Royce is one of the most frightening, cocksure, loathsome and yet sexy villains I’ve ever seen on TV.’
Is it really Tommy they’re lusting after? Or James Norton, who is undeniably gorgeous?
The latter I get. The former I cannot understand. And it worries me that a multiple rapist — remember what he did to Ann in the first series when he had her trapped in the cellar — and ruthless killer might appeal to any sensible woman with an instinct for self-preservation.
And it’s very worrying to hear from James himself that some young girls had written on Twitter that they wanted him to ‘take them down to the cellar’.
Disconcerting indeed!
OF COURSE viewers’ differing reactions to Tommy may partly be an age thing. While I find it difficult to understand how some younger women find Tommy sexy, equally baffling is why some older women, including my friend and I, feel sympathetic towards him.
We were moved to tears on Sunday night when he sat, morose, at Catherine’s kitchen table with a bleeding knife wound in his stomach, a pile of pills, an empty bottle of her whisky and the remains of a bottle of wine.
Plot-wise, you knew there was not going to be a fist fight which would put Catherine in hospital again. You knew she had the upper hand with the Taser she’d used before to devastating effect.
You also knew there was something tragic about this wicked young man. Perhaps it was my maternal instinct kicking in, but I first began to feel Tommy was worthy of pity when we saw him turn up at his mother’s house in his search for a cellar in which to conceal Ann during the kidnapping.
His mother had no desire to see him. She was drunk, drug-addicted and her home was dirty. You could see immediately a childhood with no love or care.
James Norton, who has inhabited Tommy’s character for nine years, recognised the hurt the boy had suffered. ‘I don’t think he’s a psychopath,’ he said recently. ‘He’s just incredibly damaged.’
That’s why it was so clever of Sally Wainwright to get him to break into Catherine’s house, bent on revenge, only to find two photo albums — one of Becky’s happy childhood; one of Ryan’s.
Tommy learned for the first time what a loving family looked like and recognised that Ryan’s grandma had given his son something he never could.
Going up in a ball of fire was inevitable, but even Catherine, using her sister’s crochet blanket to quash the flames, showed him some pity in the end. I would have tried to save him, too.
I’M SO shocked at the devastation caused by the earthquake in Turkey and Syria. I spent my late teenage years in the Turkish city of Adana. My father, an engineer, had a job there. It was such a happy time that it’s unbearable to see it razed to the ground and so many suffering.