It’s not only Sgt Cawood with a temper like a sawn-off shotgun
HAPPY Valley (BBC1) is almost perfect, not quite but almost. There’s only one thing wrong: it ends next week. Sergeant Catherine Cawood, a Yorkshirewoman so gritty she makes Geoff Boycott look like a soft Southerner, is about to retire from the force. And that’s if she survives the murderous plotting of escaped psychopath Tommy Lee Royce (James Norton).
either way, this will be her finale. Sarah Lancashire has given the performance of her life, but she won’t be coming back. It’s criminal.
Our best hope is that writer Sally Wainwright hasn’t finished with the series. Ann Gallagher (Charlie Murphy) — kidnapped, raped and tortured by Royce when the show began in 2014 — is now a detective constable. Could she be the future heroine of Happy Valley?
Ann gave us a glimpse of her hard edge, when she delivered a lacerating lecture to spoiled, pig-headed Ryan (Rhys Connah), the sarge’s selfish grandson. For years, no one has dared spell out to Ryan why his mother killed herself when she was barely more than his age. Ann didn’t hold back. She gave him the truth like a shotgun blast. That woman has a sawn-off temper.
even this double-barrelled dose of reality didn’t seem enough to shock some sense into the boy. By the end of the episode, he was deep in secret conversation with Royce via a video-game link, calling him ‘dad’ and listening to his schemes for a life together in Spain.
Ryan might do the sensible thing and help his gran put the killer back behind bars. But the constant theme in this story is that people can always be trusted to make the stupidest decisions.
Sgt Cawood knows it, and she’s just about run out of patience with humanity. Her simple-minded sister Clare (a brilliant performance by Siobhan Finneran) took the full brunt of her contempt, for allowing herself to be manipulated by Ryan.
The sarge knows her cynicism and her gruff sense of humour are no longer welcome in the police. even with retirement looming, she’s facing disciplinary action for kidding a gormless PC that he’d been appointed as the station’s ‘alien lifeform liaison officer’.
But she is too old to learn political correctness. She called one woman constable with a dark bob ‘Betty Boop’. You’d have to be a certain age to know what she meant.
It’s not only the cast who have elevated this series to its heights. every detail is slotted carefully into place. Last week’s courtroom escape scene, for instance, was choreographed as carefully as a Strictly dance spectacular.
Tiny clues and references are even inserted into the title sequence. Watch closely and you’ll see a tomcat on a ridge, like the one that’s always prowling a roof at the start of Coronation Street — surely a subtle nod to Sarah Lancashire’s past on the Corrie cobbles.
Details and references were in short supply as Julie etchingham traced the history of east Germany’s secret police, in The Stasi:
Secrets, Lies And British Spies (ITV1).
We were assured that hundreds of Communist sleeper agents were embedded across Britain during the Cold War, but only two were identified: Reinhardt and Sonja Schulze, who don’t sound all that British to me.
A dissident named Wolfgang Welsch told how Stasi agents took a potshot at him through the windscreen of a van on a British motorway, which sounds a slightly improbable tale.
He claimed that after the fall of the Berlin Wall, papers were uncovered that proved it was a secret assassination attempt, but I’m not convinced. There’s nothing very clandestine about shooting a motorist on the M1.