For the past six weeks, it has felt as if the country has stuck to the exact same Sunday routine. First, we wait until 9pm, then we put Happy Valley on and all stop breathing for an hour.
The sheer amount of dread writer Sally Wainwright has managed to pack into each episode of Happy Valley’s third and final series is staggering. Unless Wainwright is setting us up for the mother of all anticlimaxes, the series looks as if it has all been leading up to one final confrontation between Catherine Cawood (Sarah Lancashire) and Tommy Lee Royce (James Norton). They are each keen to move on with their lives by escaping abroad – Royce to Marbella, Catherine to the Himalayas – but it would be foolish to assume that both of them will get to the end credits alive. If by some miracle they do, it’ll be time to fear the worst for Ryan (Rhys Connah), the troubled boy at the centre of their tug of war. The whole thing has been terrifying.
