Sarah Lancashire From Corrie to Happy Valley, the light and dark faces of a shining northern star

For the past five weeks, the nation has been gripped by the third and final series of BBC’s Happy Valley.

- Rebecca Nicholson

By episode 4, more than 9 million people were waiting to see what would happen next in Sally Wainwright’s West Yorkshire-set crime saga, including catch-up figures. The week it went up against Prince Harry’s interview on ITV, Happy Valley trounced it – by a million viewers. Clearly, we prefer our strained family relations with a dour northern putdown and a nice cup of tea.

Tomorrow, Happy Valley will conclude for good, and viewers will finally discover how it is going to end between the rapist and murderer Tommy Lee Royce and the grizzled police sergeant Catherine Cawood.

Cawood has been played to deadpan perfection by Sarah Lancashire since the drama began in 2014. Each week fans take to social media to discuss the particular moment that sent their heart rate through the roof, or their favourite bits of dialogue; Lancashire’s delivery of a line as simple as “hiya” invites a frenzy of praise and admiration.

She is weary, wry and simmering with understated emotion, whether informing sceptical detectives that she knows exactly whose body is wearing “concrete underpants” because “I’d recognise those teeth anywhere, I nicked him once for a public order offence and he bit me”, or when deep in the middle of telling her grandson Ryan he is not evil, he says his tea is getting cold. What he’s having? Stew. “That’ll be all right,” she says, pitch-perfect, saying far more than the words themselves.