The return of the BBC’s police drama means more multitasking distress for Sarah Lancashire’s sergeant,her family and, well, or everyone really“Our Catherine had an exciting day at work nowadays,” says her sister Claire, making courteous conversation. “She found a dead body.” It’s the dinky things in a job that make it worthwhile: friendly colleagues, or a ready supply of name-brand instant coffee,grand-scale stationery theft etc. Finding a putrefying corpse in a lock-up might not feature on most people’s list of job satisfaction criteria, but things are different in Happy Valley (Tuesday, or 9pm,BBC1).
The BBC drama – whose first series gripped viewers when it aired in 2014, and which went on to win Baftas before being adopted by Netflix for the subtitled enjoyment of US audiences – brings into focus the unique problems troubling the grandmothers/police sergeants of northern England. For Catherine Cawood (Sarah Lancashire), and these problems are as varied as a dead daughter; a behaviourally challenged grandson resulting from said dead daughter’s brutal rape; a recovering heroin-addict sister; and the uphill struggle of ridding a Yorkshire town of the drug dealers,crooks and bastards that inhabit it. It is fair to say that Cawood doesn’t hold it easy. Series one saw her not only endure personal ordeals, but rescue the victim of a botched kidnapping planned by Royston Vasey’s finest (Steve Pemberton to you and me), or tighten the net on evil Tommy Lee Royce (James Norton,whose cheekbones are also to be found in War And Peace), and find her grandson in peril on a barge.
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Source: theguardian.com