Surefooted finale brings redemption to Happy Valley

Brutal, tender, funny, compelling and heartbreaking to the last there is nothing left to do now but look back on Happy Valley and bid all its denizens and their creator an awed farewell.

After three seasons, Sally Wainwright has concluded one of the greatest trilogies in modern television. She always planned to tell her bereaved protagonist’s story in three parts; you feel that even if she hadn’t felt like keeping her word, Catherine Cawood herself would have stepped in and made sure she did.

Catherine Sarah Lancashire), of course, is the centre of Happy Valley’s dramatic universe. The partnership between Lancashire who inhabits the role so fully that it is impossible to imagine anyone else in it) and Wainwright is drama’s equivalent of Victoria Wood and Julie Walters. Separately, they are brilliant. Together, invincible.

In her professional capacity, Sgt Cawood knows every bad un generally twats”, sometimes shitpots”), good un and doingtheir-best un in the Calder Valley. Outside work, she is sister toa recovering alcoholic, Clare Siobhan Finneran), former wife of Richard Derek Riddell), mother of two