Phwoar and Peace's hunk is now a psycho - but he's still irresistible: CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews last night's TV  

Happy Valley

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Prison Brides

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Happy Valley (BBC1) ought to have come with a stern warning for Downton Abbey fans: ‘Look away now, if you don’t want to see more of Mr Molesley the footman than you’ll ever be able to forget.’

We all know actor Kevin Doyle as the frustrated intellectual below-stairs, too shy to tell Miss Baxter that he loves her. But as this superb police drama returned, there was nothing shy about his performance, face down and bare buttocked on a hotel bed.

He played the boozy detective cheating on his wife, whose blackmailing mistress drugs his pint, strips him naked and photographs him in a feather boa and frilly underwear. We’ve seen much worse on television, of course, even decades ago in dramas by Dennis Potter, but this was shocking because Doyle has always seemed such a dependably ordinary fellow.

Sergeant Catherine Cawood is bursting with repressed grief and anger in Happy Valley (BBC1), argues Christopher Stevens 

That’s part of Happy Valley’s subversive brilliance. Set in West Yorkshire, outside Huddersfield, it depicts a community of decent folk infected by crime and drugs, and the tiny band of police overwhelmed by a tide of mindless law-breakers.

The first series two years ago was a triumph, though it inexplicably failed to win a Bafta for Sarah Lancashire as the no-nonsense sergeant who runs the local nick. Creator Sally Wainwright (also the writer of Last Tango In Halifax) is back blazing with confidence, and the script spills over with clever dialogue and unexpected lines.

Sergeant Catherine Cawood is bursting with repressed grief and anger, and the words cascade out of her, especially when she’s telling stories about work to her ne’er-do-well sister (Siobhan Finneran).

But the language is just as effective when characters are saying next to nothing. ‘How do you know I’m not going to make life difficult for you?’ asks the copper’s mistress (Amelia Bullmore), as she hands him back his toothbrush and one sock. We know . . . we definitely know.

The opening was darkly whimsical, as Cawood was forced to put a sheep out of its misery with a rock, in a surreal incident that began with poachers on LSD and ended with an outbreak of poisoned dogs.

But the plot wasted no time, and Cawood was soon a suspect in a murder enquiry after she found a mutilated corpse in a lock-up garage — the body of a woman she had good reason to loathe.

Set in West Yorkshire, outside Huddersfield, Happy Valley depicts a community of decent folk infected by crime and drugs, and the tiny band of police overwhelmed by a tide of mindless law-breakers

The victim was the mother of rapist Tommy Lee Royce. He’s psychopathic and sadistic, he’s inarticulate and brutish, but he’s also played by James Norton — who, just a couple of days ago, was saintly Prince Andrei on his deathbed in War And Peace.

With his shaven head and the tattoos of crucifixes on his neck and skull, Royce is the embodiment of all the twisted evil in Happy Valley. He and Cawood hate each other: he raped her daughter, who killed herself after giving birth.

But Norton imbues the character with such inverted charisma that it’s easy to believe women could be enthralled by him — women such as the bespectacled Frances (Shirley Henderson), who visits him in prison and has now taken to standing outside Cawood’s house, watching and stalking.

The phenomenon of women who fall for convicts is not rare, as Prison Brides (C5) showed. The interest of this one-off documentary was blunted by the fact that three of the four case studies were American — if director Danny Beck had looked harder, he would have found more than one British example.

Most of the subjects were guarded, and we sensed that large pieces of their stories were being held back. But mother-of-two Jen was pathetically vulnerable, as she told how she was marrying a bank robber called Brandon because she needed someone to protect her and her two daughters.

Brandon still had ten years to serve and, if he kept breaking the arms of other inmates, he might never get out. But in Jen’s fantasy, he was her Incredible Hulk, ‘because he’s big and strong and always in green’ . . . the green of prison fatigues.

There is one advantage to loving a prisoner, though: ‘I know where he is at all times.’