Siobhan Finneran reckons she’s “not very good with dates”. But she can remember exactly what she was doing the morning after the first episode of Happy Valley’s final season aired – because she ended up having to do an accidental victory lap of one of the North West’s least glamorous locations.
“It was at the start of ’23, wasn’t it?” recalls the actor, who played Clare Cartwright, recovering addict and younger sister to Sarah Lancashire’s indefatigable police officer Catherine Cawood, in all three series of the brilliant, Bafta-winning drama. “I was flying to Iceland to make a film called The Damned, so I was at Manchester airport. I have never experienced anything like that, because in most of the queues I stood in to get on the aeroplane, everybody had watched it the night before.” They all seemed to want a post-show debrief, from the security officers screening her luggage to her fellow passengers. “Everybody loved it, so you can’t moan about that, can you?” she reasons. “I just went red a lot, and felt a bit sweaty.”
