Happy Valley creator Sally Wainwright on what inspired show

“It’s a show about Catherine, who happens to be a police officer,” she adds. “It’s not a police procedural, it’s not a crime show. It’s really about Catherine, what happened to her in the past and this weird, crooked relationship she has with this man who affected her life so badly.”

The multi BAFTA- winning hit drama, starring Sarah Lancashire as Sergeant Catherine Cawood, returns on New Year’s Day for a final series. As with many of Sally Wainwright’s TV productions, including Gentleman Jack, Last Tango in Halifax and Bronte drama To Walk Invisible, it was partly filmed in the Bradford district, with scenes shot in Thornton in April.

Filming for the series taking place in Thornton in April (Image: Mike Simmonds, Newsquest)

When Catherine discovers the remains of a gangland murder victim in a drained reservoir, it sparks a chain of events that leads her back to Tommy Lee Royce (James Norton). Her grandson, Ryan (Rhys Connah), is now 16 and has his own ideas about the kind of relationship he wants to have with the man Catherine refuses to acknowledge as his father, leaving her sister Clare (Siobhan Finneran) caught in the middle. Meanwhile, in another part of the valley, a local pharmacist gets in over his head when a neighbour is arrested.

Sally Wainwright, who grew up in Sowerby Bridge, is the writer, creator and executive producer of Happy Valley. What initially inspired her to write it? “I saw a documentary by Jez Lewis called Shed Your Tears and Walk Away, it was about drug and alcohol problems, specifically in Hebden Bridge. The other influence was that, when I was a kid, there was a series called Juliet Bravo, which I really, really liked. It was filmed in Todmorden. It was about a female police inspector and it’s kind of in my top 10 TV shows from adolescence, so it was my attempt to revisit that.

“The other big thing that inspired me was (US comedy-drama) Nurse Jackie. I wanted to write my own Nurse Jackie, but obviously I couldn’t write about a nurse, so I wrote about a policewoman instead. When I wrote the first series that was very much in my head as an influence.”

Sally describes Catherine as “very strong and very stubborn”.

“I think she has a strong streak of irony and comedy. What I often think about Catherine is that she’s a good person to whom something very tragic has happened. That informs the character that she is now. That she’s got this streak of tragedy that strikes through her but is somebody who prior to that was very amusing and entertaining and good fun. She is strong, I think police officers have to be strong.”

Why have viewers taken to Catherine so much? “I think it’s Sarah Lancashire’s performance. I think she’s an extraordinarily empathetic performer. She conveys the real subtleties of the tiny moment-by-moment thoughts in

everything she does. The audience really engage with her.”

Did you always have Sarah in mind for the character? “Yeah, because we’d done Last Tango In Halifax where she played Caroline and she really captured my imagination. She just gets everything, every little detail, and she has that fantastic charisma and personality. So again, right from the first series, I had her in my head which really helped when I was creating the character. To be able to see her and have some pretty clear idea of how she would deliver the lines.”

It was working closely with police advisors that gave Sally the title. “They’re old police officers who have worked in the area, one of them told me that ‘Happy Valley’ is what they call it because of issues with drugs. For me it reflected the show. It’s dark, but has also a lot of humour. I think less so in season one, more so in season two. We want to continue that in the new season. It’s still very much about the dark side of life, but also about how within that people find ways of being funny, warm and human.”

When writing the show, how do you set the contrast between dark and light? “Balancing the dark and light is usually done through Catherine because she’s a fantastic character to write for. The show is kind of a portrait of Catherine, of what she’s gone through in life and the kind of person she is now. And obviously I’m writing for Sarah. Nothing will be wasted, she will get everything. She’ll push everything in the right way. She’ll get the humour across.”

Happy Valley has been one of TV’s biggest successes in recent years. Why do we love it so much? “You know the truth is it’s just an alchemy that some shows somehow manage to press buttons with people. You kind of hit a seam of gold. It does seem to capture people’s imaginations when you’re writing about the wrong side of the law. It’s about transgressive behaviour and I suppose humans are fascinated by transgressive behaviour. I guess that’s why people are so fascinated by crime. It’s a kind of vicarious thing.”

Why the long wait to write series three? “I waited six years because I wanted to get to a point where Ryan would be old enough to make choices about his dad. He can do things behind Catherine’s back. I really wanted to explore that. It’s great that we got Rhys back to play Ryan, he’s done a lovely job.

“It developed through conversations I had with Sarah to make it a trilogy. We always said this would be the final season - and it very definitely is the final season.”

• Happy Valley is on Sunday, January 1 on BBC1 at 9pm.