Give Sarah Lancashire a Bafta for this tour-de-force
Ihave to admit to a touch of Northern bias in my love for Happy Valley. Or West Yorkshire bias, to be specific. Of course you don’t have to be from this part of the world to appreciate the series. But as a local I can tell you that it captures the Calder Valley so perfectly: the landscape, the streets, the mordant humour.
Episode three picked up where episode two left off: Sgt Catherine Cawood (Sarah Lancashire) confronting her sister, Clare (Siobhan Finneran), in a Sheffield cafe. It was another tour de force performance from Lancashire, barely suppressing her rage at Clare’s betrayal. When Lancashire gets her latest Bafta – you heard it here first – this is the clip they should play.
Clare has been taking Catherine’s grandson, Ryan, to see his father, Tommy Lee Royce, in prison. She is kind-hearted but dim. Perhaps the meetings would make Royce a nicer person, she suggested, and Catherine could find a way to forgive him? But Catherine knows a psychopath when she sees one.
Writer Sally Wainwright reminds us throughout that Catherine is no superwoman. She’s tough – witness her walloping a suspect who has just given her a bloody nose – but not unshakeable. She is still grieving for
her daughter. Those maternal feelings have transferred to her grandson. There was another great scene on Clare’s doorstep, in which Catherine tried to speak to Ryan about his dad. Ryan, a typical teenager, complained that his tea was getting cold; Catherine interrupted her speech to ask what he was having. “Stew,” he said. “Oh, it’ll be all right,” she assured him. It was a tiny domestic detail that fit beautifully into the whole.
Rhys Connah has played Ryan since he was a young boy in series one. It is often the case that child actors fail to develop into convincing adolescent ones, but Connah is clearly a natural and delivers the right blend of bravado, stroppiness and vulnerability. He is a motherless boy who wants a relationship with his dad, and can’t see that he’s being manipulated.
When dodgy pharmacist Faisal snapped and attacked Joanna after discovering she had lied to him, it slightly stretched credulity – although he’s desperate, would he really lose control and resort to violence like that? But Wainwright has resisted the easy route of making Joanna a saintly victim. The character deserves our sympathy for being horribly abused by her controlling husband, but she is also unlikeable. It takes a confident writer to do that.
Jon Snow is not coping well with retirement. It happens to a lot of people who have left jobs which kept them busy and whose sense of self was tied up with their careers. The prospect of unlimited leisure time does not fill them with joy. “Suddenly there’s the rest of my life ahead of me,” said Snow in How to Live to 100 (Channel 4), in a tone of some alarm.
Actually, it’s only semi-retirement, because Snow, now 75, still gets to make programmes such as this one. But he no longer has the daily buzz of the Channel 4 newsroom (you would think that having a toddler at home – Snow and his wife welcomed a baby in 2021 – might keep him busy, but hey ho). In a bid to find out how to live contentedly into old age, he has ventured to three communities where life expectancy is uncommonly high: the Greek island of Ikaria, Loma Linda in California, and Japan. This is not a new idea; Miriam Margolyes visited Loma Linda for her own show a couple of years back, and you surely don’t need anyone to tell you that following a Mediterranean diet and eating oily fish is good for your health.
But his visit to Ikaria went deeper than tips about diet and the benefits of walking. The people he met on this tiny island (population: 8,500) seemed remarkably free of stress. Some had lived there all of their lives, while others had returned after years away. They enjoyed the simple things in life, away from the rat race, and they took their time about it. Snow went to meet an octogenarian retired doctor who had taken up sailing and arranged to meet the presenter by the water. Rather than give a specific time, the doctor said he’d be there “in the morning”. “We have three times: from sunrise to noon, from noon to sunset, and then from sunset to the next sunrise,” he explained. “This is our time, not the clock.”
The elderly are looked after by their families, not placed in care homes. And did the island’s communist past have something to do with the residents’ happiness? One elderly local said that islanders consider themselves equal, and care little for money, which took away stress. None of this was terribly scientific, but it did provide food for thought.