Happy Valley recap: series 2, episode 1 scars, sheep-rustlers and a serial killer | Happy Valley

October 2021 · 8 minute read
Happy Valley: episode-by-episodeHappy Valley

Happy Valley recap: series 2, episode 1 – scars, sheep-rustlers and a serial killer

The critics’ top drama of 2014 is back with a vengeance: the mother of last season’s villain, Tommy Lee Royce, has been found dead by none other than Sgt Catherine Cawood

“Sheep-rustling?” Eighteen months after she rescued her grandson Ryan from the clutches of his biological father – the kidnapper, murderer and rapist Tommy Lee Royce – Sgt Catherine Cawood (Sarah Lancashire) is back on familiar ground. Sitting outside the house she shares with her meek sister Clare (Siobhan Finneran), Catherine enjoys telling her incredulous sibling the story of three lads in Halifax who, while “off their heads on acid”, stole a sheep and let it loose on a housing estate, where it was mauled by dogs.

A comic anecdote – even if it’s a bloody one involving savaged livestock – seems an audacious way for writer Sally Wainwright to open season two of a show that in 2014 was critics’ and audiences’ top new drama of the year. Then it was a gripping, unflinchingly brutal thriller. What’s this?

Happy Valley is about how drugs and poverty makepeople do stupid things. For a policewoman given the impossible task of cleaning up Yorkshire’s Calder Valley, every day is a cavalcade of criminal idiocy. But boredom and fecklessness tip over easily into rage and serious violence – and Catherine treats the farce and horror as twin impostors. They’re never far apart. As the flashback continues, she’s nicking the sheep-rustlers and trying to ignore them spitting abuse at her, when she notices a smell coming from a nearby lock-up. Inside is a rotting human corpse. Roll titles.

Annette, Leonie and Catherine in Happy Valley. Photograph: Ben Blackall/BBC

After that brilliant cold opening, we’re in an unfamiliar semi-detached house. A middle-aged dad (Kevin Doyle) barely listens as three kids bicker with Mum (Julie Hesmondhalgh). Dad gets a worrying text. He sneaks out – nobody notices – and down the road to where a woman (Amelia Bullmore), younger and more glamorous than his wife, is in her car. “I’ve phoned you 16 times!” Her neck veins are bulging. He blames work stress, but this looks like less than half the real reason. “I love you!” “Yeah ... I’ll ring you.”

Happy Valley: there’s no one tougher than a middle-aged mumRead more

Helen Gallagher lies in a hospice bed, watched over by her husband and daughter, Nevison and Ann – the target and victim of season one’s horribly bungled ransom plot. Clare is there too, relaying the story of Catherine and the sheep, and providing light black comedy through her insistence on mouthing “dead body” and “decomposed” like Les Dawson gossiping with Roy Barraclough. Nevison and Ann argue mildly about the new job she’s been training for …

“Forget everything they taught you in training, because none of it works in the real world”

The next day is Ann’s first on the force, working under Catherine, whose blast of motherly advice is a typically tight piece of script that skilfully references their shared past. In season one, Catherine’s protégé Kirsten was murdered while on duty by Tommy , who years before raped Catherine’s daughter Becky, driving her to suicide. After Ann and Catherine helped each other escape from Royce, Ann vowed not to become a victim. She’s following through on that now, but it means Catherine has another surrogate daughter to worry about.

Homicide detectives have arrived. Two of them are Vincent Franklin and Katherine Kelly and another is John, the philandering dad. A briefing reveals that the body found by Catherine was Lynn Dewhurst – Tommy’s mother.

Tommy is in his cell watching daytime telly. The prison chaplain comes in and gives Tommy the news, needlessly adding that Lynn was sexually assaulted. He’s petrified, as are we, that Tommy could spring off the bed at any second and punch the messenger. Instead, he breaks down. James Norton nails it: shock – and then tears – but with a hint of steel, he already starts planning his revenge.

Sgt Catherine Cawood: the woman tasked with cleaning up Yorkshire’s Happy Valley. Photograph: Ben Blackall/BBC

As the police investigation begins, John finally rings his mistress, Vicky. She isn’t pleased when John – oh no, John, mate, don’t – dumps her by phone. But she has something to bargain with. That police warrant card he lost? She’s found it under her bed, and tells him to meet her later to get it back.

At the nick, Catherine is indignant at being grilled by Kelly’s young detective about some threatening voicemails she left Tommy’s mother. Lancashire is fabulous once again: Catherine chatters with her signature mix of nous and defiance about how Lynn had approached Ryan after school, in breach of a court order. It’s a poised two-hander, with Kelly officious and brusque, and Lancashire edgy and desperate beneath Catherine’s bluster. Another theme of Happy Valley is Catherine’s inability to stop the tide of brutality sweeping into her own family: even with Tommy in prison, his mother wouldn’t go away. Even with his mother dead, they still cause strife.

Outside, Ann passes on hearsay about the assault Lynn suffered: she was raped with a broken bottle. Happy Valley can get away with such an extreme image because of its depth of realism, and not be charged with indulging in gratuitous nastiness.

Catherine comes home, fuming, to find Clare at the kitchen table with her old schoolfriend Neil. She bumped into him earlier and was charmed by a similarly humble, troubled soul back on the scene after a divorce. A subtle performance by Con O’Neill alerts us there’s a story he isn’t telling – Clare doesn’t notice that he leaves when he sees Catherine’s police badge.

That’s not how I feel, John. I’m ... disappointed.”

John meets Vicky in a country pub. She’s waiting for him, pint on table, and listens as he splurges a barely improved attempt to brush her off.

In jail, Tommy discusses his mum with a visitor. Everything that was great in season one about Norton’s performance is back, as he makes us feel pity as well as fear and disgust. There’s boiling misogyny in his sweeping observation that “I know how a bitch like that [Catherine] thinks.” When he talks about how that bitch has obviously committed murder and will now be protected by a police cover-up, we see how deluded he is.

Tommy Lee Royce, who thinks Catherine is responsible for his mother’s murder. Photograph: Ben Blackall/BBC

Across the table is Frances, a ratty woman played by another big name, Shirley Henderson. Her first scene is an amazingly bold and physical piece of acting. Frances is grotesquely flirty, getting off on being Tommy’s confidante despite, or because of, the hate he’s spewing. When he stops ranting, she strokes his head and says she loves him. Brrrrrrr.

John, drugged, was helped into his car outside the pub by Vicky and, having briefly woken to find himself naked and alone in a budget hotel, now comes round once more. It’s morning and he’s in his car. John’s not an especially large man but Vicky must either have an accomplice, or superhuman strength when wronged. Anyway, he’s just in time for work, where it’s announced that Lynn is the latest victim of a serial killer.

“Just tick the boxes!”

If a serial killer is targeting prostitutes, Catherine is clearly innocent, but homicide still want their alibi. This brings out the only element of Sgt Cawood’s character that leans toward cliche: she’s a no-nonsense maverick who hates bureaucracy, and runs rings round her box-ticker boss Mike when he asks her to comply. Have her dim colleagues thought to head to where the local sex workers tout for business? Of course they haven’t, so Catherine drives to the red light district with a carrier bag of sandwiches for two jittery, emaciated girls she knows by name. Their hopeless inadequacy is eerily like that of the addled Lynn, who could never get off drugs and ended up raising a killer.

Ryan is at home with his uncle Daniel, Catherine’s estranged son who’s come to kip on the sofa because his marriage is crumbling. Daniel carelessly mentions that he wouldn’t be drinking beer if Clare were in the house. Her status as a recovering addict is another hideous secret from which Ryan hasn’t quite been shielded.

Just as John’s lying to his wife about his whereabouts last night, Vicky texts him photos of himself unconscious in the hotel wearing women’s underwear. She’ll forward them to everyone he knows if he doesn’t give her £1,000 a month, in cash …

So, what did you think of Happy Valley’s return? Anything featuring Kevin Doyle, Julie Hesmondhalgh and Amelia Bullmore promises excellence. That should dispel the feeling that the new John/Vicky strand is, so far, a fairly boilerplate spurned-woman blackmail tale, which doesn’t interact with what we’re really interested in: Catherine Cawood versus Tommy Lee Royce. Can Wainwright concoct a reason for them to face each other again?

Mystery of the week

What is the deal with Catherine and Clare’s back yard? They’ve not actually got one: they’ve taken advantage of living in the last house on a dead-end street and put their table, chairs and plant pots in the road. Cheeky. At best, sitting in the street smoking at all hours seems a cavalier attitude to the ever-looming threat of Yorkshire’s worst criminals.

No-nonsense idiom of the week

Time for Netflix to call the subtitlers when this episode hits the US: “You could never be certain lift’d gone to t’top floor, her brain were so addled wi’ crap” – Catherine on why she rang Lynn a second time.

Hurt in the line of duty

Happy Valley promo shots demand thatLancashire sport a battle wound and, sure enough, by the time she’s told the sheep anecdote she’s already acquired a cut cheek. It must be from struggling to arrest the tripping farm-burglars, but we don’t see it happen and Catherine is so used to being punched by low-lifes, she doesn’t even mention it. Nails.

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