Happy Valley: The five best takeaways from series three [spoilers]

As Catherine Cawood heads off into the sunset – well the Himalayas via her Land Rover – BBC1 viewers everywhere will now be experiencing a massive Happy Valley hole in their lives. But fear not as Sally Wainwright’s – now retired – Sergeant played by Sarah Lancashire lives on, thanks to her one liners, wit and wisdom. Here are five of the best lines from this year’s smash hit programme.

One:  D***heads are everywhere

In the first programme of this series of Happy Valley, Catherine explains to her 16-year-old grandson Ryan [Rhys Connah] why he shouldn’t have got quite so wound up over his PE teacher’s decision to kick him out of the football team.

“D**ckheads are everywhere,” she tells him sagely. “The trick is to negotiate your way around them without them even realising you think they are a d***head.”

Spoiler alert: We later find out that the PE teacher Mark Stanley [played by Rob Hepworth] is officially a bit more than a d******d.

Two: Food trumps everything

When Catherine finds out Ryan has been visiting his father Tommy Lee Royce [James Norton] in prison, we watch her try to explain why he is beyond redemption. “A twist, a psychological deformity. It’s an absence of something.” 

But her words have fallen on semi-deaf ears because Ryan’s tea is going cold.

Catherine then switches back to full nan mode as she asks him what he’s having..

 “Stew,” he tells her. 

“That’ll be alright,” sniffs Catherine, and like that, for that moment, it is actually okay.

Three: Can we say ‘wankertron’?

This is a one-worder,which we predict will be in common usage pretty soon if not already.  We are a family publication after all. One of our favourite one liners of the series is when Cawood is told of TLR’s latest prison escape:  “It’s just Royce trying to waste police time, like the w***** he is.”

Four: A few home truths

Catherine is not without her flaws, and in one of the final scenes [look away now if you haven’t watched episode six] Tommy Lee Royce, we can call him TLR, is sitting, mortally wounded and high on painkillers sitting at Catherine’s kitchen table. 

Catherine, is there taser in hand and having none of TLR’s attempts to redeem himself.

His clumsily worded (in our opinion he’s such a psychopath he doesn’t know the word understand) ‘I forgive you for keeping me away from my son’ is met with her derision. But slowly we see he is truly sorry. “You silly b***h” he tells her – but this time it’s because he is trying to tell her, he understands.

Five: “I won” – end of

Catherine’s previous tussle with TLR ended up with her having to have her spleen removed. So thankfully in this series things end differently. As she tells her sister Claire: “We’ve had another bit of a tussle again.” “I won… obviously”