By 
Ever get the feeling, as you contemplate the superabundance of content competing for your frazzled eyeballs, that your critical faculties, such as they were, have become so blunted by overexposure to mediocre middlebrow so-called prestige TV that you have lost any sense of what is worth watching (not much) and what’s not (everything else)?
The symptoms of this condition are not merely passive acceptance of any based-on-a-true-story bollocks the streamers barf all over your sofa — although that particular raising of the white flag is bad enough — but, crazily, palpable excitement over the prospect of yet another bleed-the-IP-dry Marvel offshoot, or an interminable overbudgeted Tolkien spin-off, or a hyperextended adaptation of a true crime podcast, or one of those hysterical docudramas about a tech wunderkind who — surprise! — turned out to be a colossal shyster, or even a nine part series based on a zombie video game. (See my colleague Henry Wong’s not entirely obliging review of The Last of Us.)
It happens to all of us, in the end, this surrender to the lame and undeserving, such is the insidious cultural dominance of Netflix, Disney, Apple, Amazon and the rest. The so-called golden age of TV (meaning American TV) is now entering its third decade, and its glow is more than a little tarnished. We started out with the Sopranos and Six Feet Under, and we’ve ended up settling for another series of Euphoria, a grotty teen skin flick bafflingly received as a coruscating insight into the lives of Gen Z American hotties. Admit it, it’s got so bad you’ve even considered giving Severance a go.
Don’t do it! Help is at hand!
Because over on BBC1, on Sunday nights, one of the great screen performances of modern times is playing out, in gripping hour-long episodes that reveal the stuff the streamers produce as the meretricious codswallop it really is. The third series of Sally Wainwright’s Happy Valley, starring the monumental Sarah Lancashire as Yorkshire police officer Catherine Cawood, is better than anything HBO or FX or AMC or any of the streamers has produced in a decade.
I want you to know that this is not an opinion. It is an established scientific fact, arrived at by a long and painful series of rigorously controlled viewing experiments conducted by me over the past few months.
Here’s how I got there, and how you can, too: an unfailing remedy for the thickheadedness caused by the overconsumption of boring TV, an instant corrective to the this-shit’ll-do-for-fifty-minutes-and-then-I’ll slope-off to-bed approach to modern leisure time.
Once you could have slipped a disc in your DVD to escape the noise. Now, you must slip a disc in your back, as I did last summer. Go for the lower back, ideally the disc between L5 and S1 (don’t worry, your chiropractor can point these out to you), to ensure it’s pushing as hard as possible on your sciatic nerve. Now see what your patience for pleased-with-itself imported genre television is like. See what your patience for anything is like, but especially cynical pop trash masquerading as — do us a favour — art.
For convenience, let’s call this the Slipped Disc Test, the ultimate arbiter of quality in drama, comedy, documentary, whatever. The question: can a TV show be so involving, so compelling, so enjoyable that your correspondent (me) is able, for the duration of an episode, to forget the insistent stabbing pains shooting down his left leg, from hip to heel, and surrender to the story on screen?
In common with most people, though perhaps less willingly, I watched a fair amount of TV over Christmas and the New Year. In order to do this I had to either lie flat on my back on the living room floor, or stand up straight, hovering in the doorway like a child who’s supposed to be in bed. Sitting for longer than about ten minutes is, at the present time, completely out of the question. You might as well suggest I watch Andor (please) standing on my head. Or complete the entirety of Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story (yuck) while swinging from a trapeze. It’s just not going to happen.
Some shows I watched performed tolerably well on the Slipped Disc Test. There’s an excellent dramedy on Disney + called Reservation Dogs (see what they did there?), following the lives of a group of teens and their families on a Native American reservation in Oklahoma. It is funny and sweet and nicely observed and it grants entrée to a world and its rituals that I know nothing about — but am persuaded, by the strength of the writing and performances, is authentically depicted. (It must be a good show for me to tolerate it, because it numbers among its creatives the writer-director Taika Waititi, who made JoJo Rabbit, which I believe to be hands down the worst film of the twenty-first century so far.)
In the case of Reservation Dogs, I find myself able to stand through an entire episode (around 40 minutes) without wincing, moaning, or wandering off to the kitchen in search of snacks. The second series of Slow Horses, on Apple, also had me periodically enthralled. The acting was uniformly terrific — especially Gary Oldman, clearly having the time of his life — but the show felt overplotted and after a while, what with my condition, I became confused by events, and then my interest drained away. I started doing stretching exercises and making pained noises and was told, in no uncertain terms, to “do one”, because I was spoiling it for others.
My children happily gorged on Wednesday, on Netflix, and the scenes I saw were, indeed, delicious. But as someone who is unlikely, even when and if I recover full use of my legs, to take part in sped-up Tik-Tok dance crazes, I felt like I should leave the kids to their indulgence.
Every other moment of festive season TV was agony, Prince Harry worst of all: you don’t need a slipped disc in your lower back to recognise a right royal pain in the arse.
But one show transported me, with the instantaneous effect of an anaesthetic shot straight into the bloodstream, to a place of no pain. It leapt the Bad Back Barrier and aced the Slipped Disc Test. That show is Happy Valley.
There is, and has long been, a belief endemic to supposedly sophisticated British people that automatically assumes that American TV beats homegrown TV, every time. That’s why all the po-faced, high-concept, megabucks American dramas get the awards and the attention and the social likes and become the subject of what passes for watercooler chat in the age of Zoom and WFH. Even in 2023, in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary (did I mention Euphoria?), mainstream American culture, with its sexily glamorous sheen, can persuade us that it is somehow better, simply by virtue of its Americanness, than anything we make here. This misapprehension pertains still, despite our latter-day embrace of Scandi noir and French comedies and Italian thrillers, and even the occasional British effort. (It’s A Sin, the best TV show of 2022, and Top Boy, the second-best TV show of 2022.)
I, too, have felt this cultural cringe. Initially it caused me to overlook Happy Valley, the first series of which aired in 2014. (Stupid, stupid me.) Happy Valley is not glamorous. There are no Oscar-winning stars slumming it because the movie studios don’t make ‘em like they used to. It is not set among gorgeous rich people in New York or California. It does not spark fashion trends, or digital memes. You won’t know or care who its lead actors are shagging, IRL. Zendaya isn’t in it. (Well, she’s not in it yet. At the time of writing we are only three episodes into the third and final season. Maybe Zendaya will pop up towards the end, wrapping fish in a chippy? She should be so lucky.)
Happy Valley — the title is ironic— is a crime drama set in contemporary Yorkshire. If it had been set in contemporary America — somewhere gritty in the Appalachian Rust Belt — it would have starred Nicole Kidman, looking weary and yet still somehow impeccable, and been precisely 43 per cent less interesting, and 78 per cent more acclaimed. Besides the marvellous Lancashire (she’s actually from Oldham) it stars Siobhan Finneran, as Sgt Cawood’s recovering alcoholic sister, and James Norton, in the role that made his name, as a terrifying psychopath, James Lee Royce, ex-husband of Cawood’s dead daughter, and father of her grandson, Ryan (Rhys Connah, excellent throughout).
I first saw Happy Valley on a long-haul flight a few years ago, only persuaded to do so by the paucity of good movies on offer. I watched season one on the way out, and season two on the way back. Both flights, erm, flew by. They were clearly more memorable than the trip, which I have otherwise forgotten.
The show is generic, in that it’s about a dedicated and professional police officer, hard as gravel on the outside, soft as snow within, whose private life is as messy and occasionally as tormented as those of the people who she encounters in her work. Nothing new there. It is a melodrama, with numerous twisty subplots, many of which would be lurid enough to strain credulity had we not all heard of equally horrifying stories on the news. In the new series we have already encountered prescription drug abuse, domestic violence and coercion, organised crime, and murder. Happy Valley is about secrets and lies, the things people hide as much as those they show. It’s about small lives, and big themes. With the exception of Tommy Lee Royce, who is bad through and through, it’s about good people trying to do their best in impossible circumstances.
Happy Valley is distinguished by the harsh beauty of its setting, the bone-dry wit of Wainwright’s writing, the believability of her characters and their complicated and nuanced relationships, a fantastic ensemble cast — but most of all, it’s distinguished by Lancashire’s performance. Happy Valley is really very good indeed when she’s not on screen, and on another level when she is.
Her Catherine Cawood is magnificent, a truly formidable person, brilliantly and movingly realised. Grief-stricken, guilt-ridden, furiously angry, she is nevertheless altogether admirable. No one suffers fools gladly, that’s a silly phrase, but Cawood’s stern, unforgiving demeanour, her penetrating stare, her brusque, no-nonsense but unfailingly compassionate attitude, her selflessness, her intelligence and her humanity: all of this Lancashire conveys without seeming to do anything but go about Cawood’s business, occasionally stopping dead still and staring silently into space. It is a performance of immense subtlety, with tiny, almost imperceptible tells signalling huge emotional shifts. Few actors can achieve so much while appearing to do so little.
I bow to no slavering fanboy in my admiration for Kate Winslet, rightly lauded for her performance as a middle aged cop on the edge in last year’s Mare of Easttown, but here Lancashire proves her equal. Winslet, we all agree, is in the front rank of screen actors, right up there with Meryl Streep and Cate Blanchett and the other great stars of the day. These are the actors who work with the biggest names in Hollywood, on the chewiest parts, and take home the Oscars for their pains.
Lancashire, as British viewers of a certain age will know, is still most famous for her breakout role, as Raquel, the dizzy barmaid, on Coronation Street, from the late Eighties on. Since then, she has worked steadily and successfully on terrestrial TV. She is a household name, an OBE, a stalwart of quality British drama. She’s unlikely to get the lead in a Hollywood blockbuster now — she’s 58, and she doesn’t appear to have taken steps to make herself look 38 — and you so probably won’t see her picking up an Academy Award anytime soon.
But who needs it? This her moment of triumph. This is her towering performance. Take it from me: you don’t want to miss it. Or don’t take it from me, take it from the Slipped Disc Test. Happy Valley is the best thing on telly, by a country mile. Hips don’t lie.
Happy Valley continues on BBC1 this Sunday and on iPlayer now.
