Finishing in style

So that’s it - the end of Happy Valley. But what a way to go. It’s been classy all the way through, from only releasing episodes a week at a time (old-fashioned water cooler telly, no selfish binging on your own) to Sally Wainwright’s insistence that this is it. No, the BEEB will not be allowed to milk this particular cow for ever (cf Line of Duty).

To someone who’s written a lot of plays, it was also a wonderful celebration of dialogue. You don’t have to have collapsing buildings, hours of gunfire. What you need is two people talking, with conviction, saying how they feel. The grizzled woman cop, enjoying telling the young man who’s abused her daughter and others that this is where he gets off. But also him telling her that she’s old and bitter, and had no right to conceal the fact he had a son. And of course, they’re both right.

When that confrontation is over, there are pieces to be picked up. Catherine realises that she’s been over-protective, that her grandson is a young man with a reasonable curiosity about what his father was like, and that her sister may not simply have been weak and stupid in helping him pursue that. In a weaker, cruder drama she’d have apologised, and the two sisters would sink into a saccharine embrace. But this is Yorkshire, where they do things differently. What the characters say is brilliant, but there’s a whole lot of other stuff which can’t be put into words. Just brilliant.