Happy Valley

Yet another season of How To Get Away With Murder has appeared on Netflix and I seem to be watching it out of a sense of duty more than anything else.  But it feels less fun than before.  I’m struggling to relate.  The characters rarely have a hair out of place, whereas someone accused me of having a perm the other day.  That, and the American gloss of each week’s new episode of Riverdale (which is equal parts cheese and artificial sweetener – a sickening combination), had left me craving something grittier.  And that’s because Brits love grit.  Our natural habitat is drizzle under grey overcast skies.  Our national pastime is wincing at Brexit.  Our approach to public transport is never to make eye contact.  Revisiting Fleabag for last week’s blog had reawakened my genetic predilection for the darker things in life.  Then I discovered Happy Valley.

Yeah, I know I’m late again.  Two seasons of this crime drama had gone out between 2014 and 2016, but my discovery of this gritty-as-gravel northern fare is timely while the internet buzzes with speculation about when 2019’s rumoured third series will air.  But, whether early adopter or bandwagon clamberer, the main thing is that my need for British grit was met in the Netflix menu by the sight of Sarah Lancashire in a fluorescent police jacket scowling into the bleak weather of some sort of Yorkshire scenery.  Where do I begin?  Let’s start with Sarah Lancashire.  It’s lame to mention an actor’s early work, but Lancashire did spend 338 episodes (and a feature-length special) of Coronation Street smoking cigarettes behind the bar of the Rovers Return and saying “Oh, Curly” on a regular basis as Raquel Watts née Wolstenhulme.  Then she branched out into the epic biopic Seeing Red (2000), where she went about adopting needy children – what a hero!

Therefore, thanks to gaps in my following of her career, my next encounter with her was the opening scene of Happy Valley, where she arrives at an unfolding crime (a drug-addled young man threatening to torch himself in a kiddies’ playground) and tries to talk down the perpetrator.  Here was the grit I had been after.  Heroin addiction in the family?  Check.  Problem relationships with her children?  Check.  An irreverent approach to the emotional upheaval involved in deciding you ought to set yourself on fire?  Check.  Wet pavements all around?  Check.  I mean, let’s hear it for wet pavements.  Happy Valley’s truest grit comes from the grim townscapes on which its characters run around chasing each other: paving slabs, concrete, tarmac.  All look naff dry.  All look even more dispiriting when glistening with that morning’s downpour.  It almost makes your eyes suffer.  I love it.

But nobody seems to suffer more than Catherine Cawood.  Before we even start series one, she has lost a daughter to suicide, is raising a practically orphaned grandson, been divorced, regressed in her career and painted her kitchen cupboards really garish colours.  As the action unfolds, the bruises accumulate, with some of the graphic violence proving hard to stomach.  But the torture is also emotional, which can lead to the feeling that Lancashire ends up crying in every scene.  However, this makes things seem too depressing.  She gets the best lines and delivers them so well that a plucky humour and no-nonsense approach permeates all scenes.  In short, it’s an incredible performance and I’m only sad that I’ve now already seen every episode currently available.

Around her, though, is gathered a cast of Halifax citizens who interconnect in all manner of disturbing ways in order to drive the plot forward.  Series one focuses on a very ill-conceived kidnapping and ransom storyline that seems to escalate from a denied salary increase to aggressive hostage-taking within a couple of conversations.  In the second season, we combine a serial murder investigation with an extramarital affair gone wrong and a very shifty teaching assistant trying to access Cawood’s grandson.  As I said, it’s a big crock of grit and it’s exactly what I was after.  For me, prominence in this Halifax cast must be given to Siobhan Finneran, who plays Catherine’s sister.  Given that her addiction problems are referenced in the opening lines of the first scene, it’s a tense inevitability that that wagon will be fallen off.  In fact, her array of impractical cardigans is a distracting yet well characterised reminder that she is somewhat of an impractical person.  If, like me, you spent your youth watching late-night films on Channel 4 that you were probably not old enough for, you’ll recognise Finneran from Rita, Sue And Bob Too.  Hopefully this film’s title gives you an indication of its bawdy subject matter, but I’m in no way ashamed to say I’ve seen it several times and even forked out for tickets to the play it’s based on.  I recommend this to all of you.  And, funnily enough, George Costigan, who plays Nevison Gallagher, played this film’s Bob to Finneran’s Rita, so I’m hoping Sue gets in on the action again for series three.

Yet again, I’m gently poking fun at Happy Valley, but it’s a boxset that everyone should see.  There’s very little wrong with it: bad characters can be identified by their constant drinking of beer cans, the same group of men spend almost all their time unloading bags of sand off a truck on one farm, the action escalates very quickly in the first series.  This is because there is so much right with it.  And the rightest thing of all is that this isn’t American gloss.  There are no shoot outs and high-speed car pursuits.  In fact, the climactic chase of the second series involves two relatively gym-averse middle-aged characters struggling not to slip on railway sleepers (wet with drizzle, obviously).  Yet this apparently plodding action is miles tenser than anything else.  Sure, nobody looks as cool as an NYPD cop in a bulky bright yellow police jacket with an extendable truncheon hanging off it, but Happy Valley gripped me like nothing else has in a long time.  Your life will be improved by the quality of Sarah Lanchashire’s performance and the relief that this isn’t your real life, as there’s no happiness in this valley.