Happy Valley - A Potentially Unpopular Opinion

The following contains spoilers for the series 3 finale of Happy Valley. Note: not season 3. This is not an advert on CBS. If you haven’t yet seen it then go away now. But do come back when you’ve seen it and tell me whether you agree with what follows below. 

So look, those of you still with me, we have to talk about what just happened there and the overblown reaction to it on social media. The general consensus is that the last episode - extended from its regular 60 minutes to 70 minutes due to the sheer magnitude of it - is the greatest hour (and a bit) of television ever made. It’s just…well…not. Is it?

Don’t get me wrong. It’s good. It’s very, very, good. Sarah Lancashire and James Norton are great in the lead roles. Even Siobhan Finneran as Lancashire’s Catherine’s sister Claire has her moments when she’s not stumbling around wearing that look of confused sadness on her face. I’m not so sold on the performances of sulky, monosyllabic Rhys Connah as Ryan or Con O’Neill’s terminally gullible Croaky Neil but these are minor quibbles. Things you can get away with and still be the greatest show ever made. But some things you can’t.

My main beef is the ending. From the moment Catherine returns home to find Norton’s Tommy Lee Royce in her house the ship starts to list a little. Most of the scene in which they confront each other is TV gold. Three series and nine years of mutual hatred and the reasons for it spew forth. But the writer must have been fretting about running time, needing to stretch it out a little at that point. Which is somewhat ironic given the time-saving hatchet job done on the subplot which we will come too later. For now we will focus on the Catherine-Tommy showdown.

When they’ve said all that needs to be said, when the action is crying out for a denouement. For the pair to have a bloody fight to the death. Just at that moment we get overkill. The conversation has run it’s course but we still get another 10 minutes of dialogue between the two which, while delivered wonderfully and with the same intensity by the actors, is basically just one saying “fuck off” and the other saying “no, you fuck off”. Eventually Tommy can take it no more and brings it to a merciful end by setting himself on fire. Perhaps this is what women mean when they keep telling me that James Norton is hot. Though I doubt it.

I’m a patient man so the dragged out verbal duel was not a deal breaker. And yes I am aware that I have just used the Americanism ‘ deal breaker’ right after balking at the use of the Americanism ‘season’ but the truth is I couldn’t think of a better phrase. Anyway, the point is that there was still an opportunity to redeem the situation. But having dragged out the argument between Catherine and Tommy there isn’t enough time to wrap up the Faisal, Joanna, Rob situation. To recap the painstakingly cultivated sub-plot: 

Schoolteacher Rob is a domestic abuser. He is physically bullying wife Joanna. She’s on prescription drugs but she can’t get enough so she goes to friendly neighbour and pharmacist Faisal for some extras. As they grow closer throughout the series she reveals Rob’s violent streak to Faisal. So together she and Faisal plot to kill Rob. Only before they get round to that piece of business they have a row about exactly who she has told about their medication transactions. There’s some shouting, a bit of push and shove and then he violently clubs her over the head with a rolling pin. The implication is that he finishes her off by injecting fresh air into her as she lies convulsing from the head trauma. It all seems a bit extreme for a quiet but neurotic character such as Faisal but we probably should remember that he is under extreme pressure having got himself mixed up with eastern European gangsters with perfect Yorkshire accents. 

Whatever you think of this sub-plot it is significant and took up a good chunk of screen time throughout the show’s final, six-part run. So for it to be wrapped up by Catherine in one line on her way out of the door on her last day with the force feels a little disappointing. The information - that Faisal has been caught for the pill peddling (and maybe the murder?) and Rob for the possession and sharing of indecent images - is delivered to the DCS so matter-of-factly that Catherine might just as well have been reminding Croaky Neil to pick up a bottle of milk and some tea bags before he drops Ryan off at home. Driving Ryan around seemed to be Croaky Neil’s sole function whether Catherine approved of their chosen destinations or not. Regardless, this ‘by the way’ approach is not the stuff of the greatest hour of TV in history. Give me 20 minutes of Kelly McDonald saying ‘no comment’ in Line Of Duty over this any day.

And another thing. Sorry I’m on one now and nobody ever said this blog was structured. It can be a bit stream of consciousness. Why did they have to turn Rob into a paedo?  Yes he had to go down for something but was beating up his wife not enough? I’m not an expert on these things but I have it on good authority that the combination of wife beater and schoolboy groomer in the same individual is not a common one. It felt tacked on for shock value and seemed to imply that being a wife beater alone simply isn’t nasty enough for a character you’re meant to hate and whose demise you are encouraged to enjoy. 

For all this, I did enjoy it. It’s a great series. I’m triggered however by all the talk on social media of this being the greatest hour (and 10 minutes) of TV. Whether it’s TV, film, music or sport there is this modern pandemic of every new thing having to be the best in history. Not only is this irritating but it shows a lack of knowledge and imagination. It’s lazy. But that’s probably Twitter for you.

But why can’t something just be very, very good and be left at that?  

Jimmy Krankie On The Iron Throne

I had a slight problem with my chair last week. One of the back wheels got jammed. I have to take the wheels off to be able to get it in the car but one of them would not budge. Fortunately on the day this first became a problem Emma was with me. She took the good wheel off and put the remaining one-wheeled chair on to the back seat of the car. But this was not a sustainable solution going forward. I have to be able to go out in the car on my own and as I’ve explained to you many times I don’t go out by myself on the off chance that a passer by will help me.

So I had to call Rosscare. They are the company charged with maintaining NHS wheelchairs. They are woefully named. Rosscare do not care. They should be called Rosscouldn’tgiveafuck. It is no exaggeration to say that on the last five occasions I have needed them to come out to help me they have turned up without the right parts. The last mechanic who visited me said he was almost certainly quitting the job because he was so sick of going to people’s houses only to find that they need something entirely different than what he has been told to provide. If you phoned Rosscare asking for a new set of tyres for your chair they would be just as likely to bring you a a basket full of fruit. Which would all have gone bad by the time it got to you.

So I speak to them as rarely as possible. But there was no way around it this time. Hopes of an unlikely success were raised when they said they could visit me at my workplace on the day that I rang them. It would have been easier to do it on a day when I was working from home but it couldn’t wait. Still, to be fair to them they were there within the hour. It was the last thing they got right for two days. 

There were two of them when they arrived. That’s unusual. Normally they only spare you one mechanic. I met them just by reception and jumped out of the offending chair on to a spare seat. One of those which swivel, which didn’t help. After my transplant it took me a month and a half to learn how to transfer on to chairs that don’t move. I’m still not great at it. It takes a little while. Not only that but my shoes inevitably fall off during the transfer. I can’t get shoes to fit at the moment. When I was in the hospital they insisted I wear their compression stockings. Since then I have developed biff feet, swollen to absurd proportions. I have the feet of a grossly overweight 80 year-old woman.

I make it on to the seat and the pair set about examining my chair. They look genuinely surprised when they can’t get the wheel off. As if I’ve either made the whole thing up to troll them or I’m so useless that I just can’t do it myself. They up the intensity a bit, pulling harder at the wheel, giving it a bit of a kicking. At no point do they go back to the van to get any tools which might help them complete their mission. But this is Rosscare. They’ve probably been told I have a completely different problem. I bet there is a basket of darkening fruit in the van. 

This goes on for about 10 minutes during which there is no movement. Just like it was yesterday my wheel is about as likely to move as Blackadder’s Frenchman who lives next door to a brothel. Finally, the slightly less shambolic of the two takes the initiative and makes a call to his boss. I only hear one end of the conversation but it doesn’t sound all that promising. My legendary ability to see the worst is justified this time. Whoever he has just spoken too - colleague, manager, CEO off Rosscare, bloke who runs the fruit stall - has told him that his task is impossible. The chair will have to be taken into the workshop and I am about to hear the words that every wheelchair user fears most. Loan chair. 

Wheelchairs aren’t one size fits all. They are not johnnies. The chances of the company that can’t provide a set of tyres in five attempts finding a suitable chair for my needs are microscopic. But what choice do I have? I reluctantly agree, naively hoping that they’ll provide something which will at least be good enough to get me around the house. I might have to stay in the house for a few days but with home working still A Thing I’m confident I can muddle through. The mechanics leave with parting apologies and I go back to the office and wait for a call with the details.  

I’m informed that they will not be able to get back out that day (Friday) but that they will come to my home on Sunday with the loan chair. I’ll just have to get through Saturday without going out in the car but that is not much of a hardship these days. Saturdays are for glueing myself to the sofa watching Netflix and Sky Sports. If I’m going out in the car on a Saturday then either I won’t be back the same day or something has gone drastically wrong. 

Sunday morning comes. It’s standard when you are expecting a visit from Rosscare that they do not tell you exactly when that will be. Sometimes they will let you know whether it will be in the morning or the afternoon but nothing more specific than that. On this day I haven’t even been told that much. Fortunate then that I don’t really like to stay in bed on days when I’m not working so I’m up and about by 8.30am. That’s about as early as they could possibly arrive. I cannot envisage such a half arsed operation being on it any earlier than that. Not that I blame them for that. I’ve never worked a minute I didn’t have to. And it was a Sunday.

Around 11.00 that morning another hapless victim mechanic shows up at my door. I go out and take a look at my loan chair. My expectations were low but I am still blown away by the sheer unsuitability of this contraption that sits on my ramp. The mechanic holds on to it proudly, smiling at me as if it has solved all my problems. 

His smiley pride turns to confusion when I inform him that the loan chair is unusable. I know that as soon as I clap eyes on it because it’s folded up. I haven’t used a chair with a seat that folds since Leslie Crowther and Matthew Kelly were prime time Saturday night TV stars. It’s clearly a relic that should be in a museum and not anywhere near my arse. It’s also completely square. And absolutely massive. I bet it weighs 12 times what my own chair weighs. 

On the phone they had given it a dynamic sounding, sporty name. They had warned me that it was the only chair they had but through my natural skepticism the name had been enough to persuade me that I’d at least be able to use it to go to the bathroom. But it was just too big. It was as big as the Millennium Falcon. It had trap doors, secret passages and prison quarters. If I tried to push that thing I would have looked like Jimmy Krankie sitting on The Iron Throne. 

We were running out of options. To his credit the mechanic accepted my dismissal of the Millennium Falcon with good grace. I think he inwardly agreed with me that Rosscare were offering the most farcical replacement since the last change of Prime Minister. He offered to have another go at removing the troublesome wheel from my own chair. I explained to him what the other mechanics had said about it being an impossible job without taking the chair in. He smiled and nodded with a trace of sarcasm which suggested he had little faith in what the other mechanics or the people running Rosscare thought. It was going to be difficult to source another loan chair so I decided that someone else having a go at it couldn’t do any harm. He stepped inside while I transferred to the sofa and he took my chair to the van.

It could not have been more than 10 minutes later when he came back in. The speed of his return didn’t really boost my hopes. The other mechanics had only spent a similar amount of time pondering a solution and I know from experience that if these guys actually do some work successfully it usually takes at least twice as long. Yet there was something about his demeanour when I looked up at him that changed the game. His sarcastic smile was replaced with one of seeming self-satisfaction.

“All done.” He said.

“Really?” I asked, not really daring to dream. 

“Yeah, look.”

He took a wheel off with ease. Then the other. I asked him how he’d done it and he told me that he’d used a mallet. And a bit of lube. We’d actually hammered it with lubrication spray to no effect on the day it got stuck. But we haven’t got a mallet. That may have made all the difference but if so I can’t explain why the Doofus twins who turned up at work on Friday didn’t try it. Or why whoever they spoke to had told them it was impossible to do without taking it in for a few days. Our only working theory is that it may have taken some time for the lubrication we used to travel down to where it needed to be. After all, with the wheel jammed we couldn’t spray anything inside the axel.it was all on the outside slowly seeping in.

I have had this chair since 2015. It’s almost as much of a museum exhibit as the one they tried to foist on me before the miraculous repair. I have an appointment with wheelchair services towards the end of February.  I guess it will be a few months after that until I get my new one. At least. It is almost a year since I ordered my next Motability car which is still to materialise. If that is anything to go by there may yet be more visits from Rosscare mechanics to endure.