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10 Things We Learnt About Happy Valley Season Three From Its Creator Sally Wainwright

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4 years ago

January 22, 2023

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Pushing The Drama Envelope

Happy Valley is halfway through its third series and here’s ten things we learnt about the new run and the show in general from Radio Times…

This will definitely be the final series: “”We made a definite decision that this was going to be the final season…Just because it’s been successful, we weren’t going to let it drift on until it became a pale shadow of itself.”
There was a practical reason as to why the new run took a few years to complete: “During a large part of the hiatus I was writing and directing Gentleman Jack, which is such an intense project. I had to read and transcribe Anne Lister’s diaries and turn them into a dramatic narrative.”
Wainwright knew how the story would develop next: “After season 2 of Happy Valley, I had a pretty clear idea of what I wanted to do next. It involved Ryan being old enough to have some agency in the world and to have some more developed opinions about his dad.”
They had considered replacing Rhys Connah as Ryan but they decided not to in the end: “There was a conversation about recasting Ryan, but Rhys [Connah] was keen to play the part again and he’s great. I think we’d have had a very different show if we’d recast. It wouldn’t have had the same feeling because Rhys has a lovely vulnerability about him.”
Wainwright was keen to wrap Happy Valley with a conclusion that would keep the quality up, she revealed:”I was really anxious not to write a duff third season. I really don’t think it is. There’s a very definite climax.”
The writer and creator does tease us how the new run is going to end: ““A narrative has gone across all three: in season 1, Catherine and Tommy came face to face outside Ryan’s school, and in season 2 they almost came face to face in the crematorium, at Tommy’s mum’s funeral. In season 3, there’s a very big face-to-face showdown. The kind of cathartic showdown that people have waited for…It’s pretty dramatic.”
James Norton as Tommy Lee Royce is a character who despite his psychosis does have a connection with his son and this is something that the writer found fascinating: “I guess that, from a writer’s point of view, the chemistry between them is [created by] presenting each character as they would like to present themselves. So even though Tommy does these terrible things, I always wanted to be fair to him and show why he does them. He’s cursed with this psychopathic brain…As Ryan says a couple of times in this season, ‘Tommy was born like that, it’s not his fault.’ And Catherine agrees with him, but she says that’s why you have to throw away the key.”
For Wainwright, making sure that the portrayal of a female police officer was accurate has always been high on her list of priorities here, despite the tabloids’ criticisms: “I worked on Happy Valley with a police adviser called Lisa Farrand. She was pretty cross with some of that criticism because it’s the reality of being a cop; she’s been badly beaten up twice and nearly killed once. To not reflect it in a drama that is realistic about what it’s like to be a female police officer would be a whitewash.”
It was a 1980s popular TV police show in fact that she turned to for inspiration, plus a number of other things: “I was heavily influenced by Juliet Bravo [BBC1 1980–85], which I watched as a teen. Nurse Jackie [the US comedy drama] had a profound effect on me and I wanted to create my own Jackie Peyton, by turning her into a police officer…There was also a 2009 documentary called Shed Your Tears and Walk Away by Jez Lewis, about the drug and alcohol culture in Hebden Bridge among a certain age group. It’s really heart-breaking but brilliant. I got the cast to watch it before we started filming season 1. It helped set the tone for what we were trying to achieve.”
She now directs as well as writes some of the show as well as Gentleman Jack and directing offers her the opportunity to do something different to writing: “Writing is very lonesome and I love nothing more than being on my own. I’m not a sociable person. I recently decided that I’m slightly autistic and that social interaction is actually quite painful for me. But when I’m directing, because there’s so much to talk about, so much intensity and detail, I come alive. It’s the only time I feel like I’m good at being sociable.”