This comes to the attention of the family that considers supplying any kind of illegal substance to these increasingly troubled towns their monopoly business. Joanna’s supplier is the local pharmacist, Faisal Bhatti (Amit Shah), who is running a small-scale pill mill. Catherine turns up and soon has his abusive, coercively controlling number, though his wife won’t – yet? – admit to anything. When Bob finds out, he assaults and humiliates her before calling the police. Joanna Hepworth (Mollie Winnard), the wife of Ryan’s football coach, Bob – a bully who calls the lad “a little shitstain” on the pitch – is taking non-prescription diazepam. With that hare off and running, we turn to what has always been Happy Valley’s greatest strength – the domestic strife of those in and around Cawood’s vicinity and the tracing of the tendrils that will gradually entwine with the main narrative, because everything in Calder Valley, as in life, is more intimately connected than we generally care to recognise (or guard against). The police know that a local drugs kingpin ordered a recent failed hit on Tommy in prison and are hoping Tommy will name him as the murderer – but he names an Oldham villain instead.
He admits being involved in the man’s “punishment” for an unpaid debt, but not with the killing. Tommy, still in prison, is arrested for the murder of the man in the reservoir. But in keeping with Wainwright’s abiding truth, the best laid plans of middle-aged women gang aft agley, and elsewhere the forces are gathering that will shatter Catherine’s once again. She has bought a Land Rover in order to set off on a drive to the Himalayas as soon as she stops work. “Aye, well,” says Catherine, “I’m feeling it now.” And I know that it’s not the be-all and end-all to get hitched to the first flaky twat of a man who happens along.” And before you can quite think: “Hang on, that sounds a bit preachy for Catherine/Wainwright!” Clare points out that she’s always been like that. I say it like it is, I don’t take shit off anyone any more. “I’m just becoming the person I’ve always wanted to be. Catherine muses on how much she’s looking forward to imminent retirement, and the blessings age brings.
“We move on, don’t we, in the end,” says Clare as she and Catherine take one of their breaks out in the garden, six months on from the discovery at the reservoir. Clare is still sober and with Neil, who seems to be stable, too. Richard and Daniel are both at Ryan’s 16th birthday tea. They are, in Cawood terms at least, enjoying a bit of peace. George Costigan is back as Nevison Gallagher and his daughter, Ann (Charlie Murphy), is still with Catherine’s son, Daniel (Karl Davies). Those years have also elapsed in the fictional version of Calder Valley, but all the main characters we have come to love or hate – Catherine (Sarah Lancashire), her ex-addict sister, Clare (Siobhan Finneran), her ex-husband, Richard (Derek Riddell), the tangled mass of conflictions that is her grandson, Ryan (Rhys Connah), and Tommy Lee Royce (James Norton) – are here.
#Happy valley number series
Yes, writer Sally Wainwright’s masterwork is back, six years since the second series ended. She’s going to be sorry she gave them that, because he’s connected to her nemesis, but the moment is glorious. She has just given them the identity of a partial skeleton in a cement-filled barrel that has been revealed by the draining of a local reservoir.
Or “twats”, as she puts it, leaving a particularly egregious pair of them dumbfounded in her wake in the opening scene of the third and final series of Happy Valley (BBC One). C atherine Cawood is seven months, one week and three days away from retirement and is still dealing with the inexperience, incompetence, arrogance and assorted other failings of the people around her.
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