Happy Valley - how good was it?

After settling in back home, I've caught up with the final two episodes of Sally Wainwright's Happy Valley. Suffice to say that they lived up to the quality of the first four instalments. If there is a better crime series on television this year, I'll be surprised and impressed. I was gripped from start to finish.

A word about the acting. Sarah Lancashire was brilliant as the appealing yet damaged police sergeant, and is sure to win plenty of awards for demonstrating a remarkable range of very believable emotions. The supporting cast was also excellent. James Norton played a chilling and psychopathic villain, yet he managed to endow Tommy Lee Royce with one or two redeeming qualities. He was such a plausible loser,you would never guess that Norton is a product of Ampleforth and Cambridge. His shifting relationship with scheming villain Ashley (Joe Armstrong) was superbly done. Those two men really can act to a very high standard.

And now for the writing. Sally Wainwright delivered an outstanding script that drew on some of the better elements of soap opera dramatics, without compromising on originality, and created credible characters with whom it was all too easy to empathise, even in some cases (Kevin the accountant springs to mind) where the empathy was barely deserved. There were several lines that were genuinely memorable, a few that were brilliantly witty, and a number of scenes that were poignant without being contrived. You could never be sure what was going to happen next. It was even more striking than Broadchurch, my favourite cop drama of 2013.

A few plot strands, especially about police corruption, were left unresolved, a whopping clue to the fact that a follow-up series is likely. Will it be as good as this one? I have no idea, but if it is, it will be unmissable.

Happy Valley (BBC One) and Hinterland (BBC 4) - TV reviews

Happy Valley, on BBC One, and Hinterland, on BBC Four, have now been running for three episodes each. Happy Valley is a single story, divided into hour-long episodes, whereas Hinterland features a different case over an hour and a half each week, but although the two shows are quite distinct, they have some things in common, most importantly good writing. From a personal point of view, I'm familiar with (and very keen on) the settings of both shows. Happy Valley is filmed around the Hebden Bridge area, the borders of Lancashire and Yorkshire, close to the Pennines. Hinterland is set in and around Aberystwyth, and features places like Borth and Devil's Bridge as well as the beautiful, if often brooding, Welsh landscape.

Some critics have compared the bleak mood of Hinterland with that of the various Scandinavian noir shows that have proliferated in recent years, and it doesn't suffer by comparison.This is an unusual show, because the stories were shot first in Welsh and then in English, which must have been hard work for everyone involved, but the result is worthwhile. Hinterland may lack a Kenneth Branagh, but to my mind, mid-Wales is at least as enticing a backdrop for a crime series as anywhere in Scandinavia, and I'm surprised we've had to wait so long for it to be used to such good effect. I don't think the quality of the murder mystery plots is quite at the level of those of, say, the Wallander stories, and it's a shame that the interesting novels of Lindsey Ashford, who lives in Borth and has set her enjoyable books in that area, have not been adapted for television as yet. Overall, though, Hinterland is definitely worth watching.

Happy Valley unquestionably delivers on plot, and much else besides. The series is written by the gifted Sally Wainwright, and stars Sarah Lancashire as the thoroughly decent small town detective who finds herself mixed up in a kidnapping case in which she has a personal reason to hate the worst of the bad guys. There were some uncertainties of tone in the first episode, in which an accountant makes a spur of the moment decision to encourage a criminal acquaintance to kidnap the daughter of his boss. At that point, I wondered if we were in for a black comedy, or perhaps some form of criminal quasi-soap opera (an unfeasible number of the characters suffer from serious illness or other misfortunes.) But since then, the story has settled down and become a powerful thriller with plenty of twists in the plot and subtlety in the characterisation.

Sarah Lancashire may be best known as a former soap star, but she is a very good actor, and her performance in Happy Valley is terrific. I'm also impressed by the way the dynamics in the relationships between the kidnappers are shifting. There are a few light moments, but on the whole, the story is pretty dark, and certainly gripping. I am really eager to watch next week's instalment.

Scott & Bailey - review

Scott & Bailey is a brand-new ITV crime drama, following hot on the heels of Vera. As with Vera, the focus is on women detectives, but there are more differences than similarities – starting with the fact that this series is not based on novels: the scripts by Sally Wainwright are original to television. Each episode is half length of a Vera screenplay, the setting is urban (Manchester) rather than rural and the two lead characters are detective constables rather than more senior officers.

The first episode opens with a romantic dinner between DC Rachel Scott and her smooth but sleazy barrister boyfriend which turns into a disaster when he dumps her. Soon she and DC Janet Bailey are investigating the suspicious death of young pregnant Turkish woman – it is an apparent suicide which turns out to be murder.

Close parallels develop between the case and Rachel's disastrous relationship. Strangely enough, the plotting of the criminal investigation part of the story struck me as more credible than the fact that Rachel (potentially a very likeable character) would commit more than one crime herself in the course of extracting revenge on her ex. By the end, it wasn't easy to keep sympathy with her, which I can't imagine the writer intended.

The cast is good, with Suranne Jones and Lesley Sharp as the title characters, and the excellent Amelia Bullimore as their boss. The writing is pacy, if at times uneven, and the Mancunian setting realistic although verging on the bleak. All in all, a reasonable start to a new series, and I'll probably watch it again next week.