"We've had another bit of a tussle. I won, obviously." Catherine Cawood Happy Valley Series 3 Episode 6. My name is Luke and I have a confession to make. I was sat at the Edinburgh Television Festival in 2015 (I think) when the BBC announced that Happy Valley would be...
The penultimate Happy Valley consisted of three deeply important conversations. The first comes from an unlikely source. Several times throughout the course of the series, Ryan (Rhys Connah) has asked his family to be honest with him about what his dad subjected his...
Last week, as Ryan was leaving his visit with his 'father', Tommy (James Norton) asked him how his bungee jump went. It felt like a glib throwaway question, especially when he proposed the idea of a father and son jump in a few years. Even Ryan (Rhys Connah) dismissed...
Happy Valley has always been Ryan's story. That's the main reason we had to wait such a long time for this final series. Sally Wainwright wanted to wait for Ryan (and the actor Rhys Connah) to be of age to tell the story she wanted. Following on from last week's...
I have praised Sally Wainwright's dialogue in every review of one of her shows I've ever written. The second episode of Happy Valley series 3 proved it can be just as powerful in its quieter moments. The bombshell that it's Claire (Siobhan Finneran) and her boyfriend...
ere were times when I worried the BBC had forgotten they'd commissioned a third series of Happy Valley. Sally Wainwright had busied herself with passion project Gentlemen Jack and started work on a new Disney+ series, The Ballad of Renegade Nell. It had seemed Happy...