BBC: Big Bad Copper

Happy Valley's on tonight, the TV highlight of the week. I've found myself squirming, shuddering and looking away as the violence has become ever more unbearable. There's little justice in this northern town – there's decent people who get slapped at every turn, weak people thrown into terrible situations, and downright evil to fill in the gaps. 

: spoiler time :

It's interesting that Fargo is on 4 a couple of nights before, because Happy Valley's kidnapping comes from the same place as the one in the Fargo movie – a supposedly harmless spot of abduction for a bit of cheeky cash. 'Ultraviolence' is arguably another property shared by both, as inevitably the crimes deepen. But Happy Valley has this grim, gritty realism which contrasts with the Fargo series, which is slick and contains dramatic, thought-out passages full of riddles and metaphor. Fargo's main characters, except for the female officer, are pretty hard to decipher, whereas Happy Valley's characters have their aims and worries and pressures and pasts, all written on their faces, often ready to rip them apart. The only time the realism breaks down is when Sergeant Cawood has terrifying visions of her dead daughter, visions which increase in intensity as the local pressures increase, showing the fragile relationship a mind has in dealing with reality itself. 

Of course, such a blunt approach to violence has its critics. The Daily Mail's deft tactic of being morally outraged at something while reselling it to their readers (just think of all the bikini girls on their website, alongside tut tutting articles condemning the sexualisation of kids – Dacre, you old fox) is put in full force, as they show an almost frame by frame coverage of Cawood's brutal beating and its aftermath. At the same time they align themselves with viewers who found the violence to be too much, and Mediawatch-UK who suggested that the show depicts 'gratuitous violence, often against women.'

It's a little strange to interpret misogyny into this show, considering that, more than any other show I can think of, it has in Cawood the most human, strong and substantial female character you're likely to find. The beating she gets at the end of episode 4 is just a phsycial manifestation of the emotional onslaught that she's been continually bearing, a result itself of various cases of extreme violence on women. Far more than showing violence, the series expresses the damage that violence can cause. Many shows are just violent – bang, bang, and move on. 24 is probably a decent enough example. I doubt that palatable violence is preferable to shocking violence. In Happy Valley, it all goes to show how fragile and human Cawood is – she only shows herself to be different from the rest of us when she puts on that professionally chipper tone when addressing a member of the public. 

The Mail also wrote a good review of Happy Valley. But of course generally the paper gets irate about the BBC's political correctness. Not this time, hey. Perhaps, dare I say, the Mail just has a problem with the BBC. I rarely watch BBC dramas because they're a little trite and camp, and predictable, with the same BBC gloss pasted over them. Happy Valley is a great exception to the usual BBC tricks (I do like the BBC in general, by the way). It's on tonight, and I'm already emotionally preparing myself for some hard-to-watch awesomeness. But if you're still not convinced, listen to the creator Sally Wainright, who retorted, 'you can always turn the telly off.'