Happy Valley and Banquo’s ghost

One of the odd things about growing old in Ecuador is that you occasionally find yourself understanding English literature better while admiring the view from Larga Towers in Cuenca than you ever did in England itself. This happened to me recently while watching the brilliant TV cop show Happy Valley, written by Sally Wainwright. Like many people of my generation, I was exposed to a great deal of William Shakespeare at school, usually involving gloomy classrooms, annotated paperbacks, and teachers explaining why medieval kings in Denmark or Scotland were very upset about something or other. One respected old Shakey because one was supposed to respect Shakespeare, much as one respected cod liver oil or Sir Winston Churchill, but the full emotional impact of stage tragedies did not always land until several decades later. Then along comes a TV show about a middle-aged policewoman in Yorkshire and suddenly Shakespeare begins to make a lot of sense. The plot of Happy Valley begins almost absurdly modestly. A factory accountant named Kevin asks his wealthy employer for a pay rise so he can send his daughters to private school. He feels humiliated by his position in life, trapped between the owners and the factory workers. When the request is refused, he makes a terrible mistake and dreams up a scheme to kidnap the boss’s daughter for ransom to compensate for the financial differential that he feels he deserves, and as one does when one lacks experience in specialist operations like kidnapping and extortion, he approaches a local organized crime figure to handle the logistics — bad move. Because he is not a criminal mastermind, but an ordinary fellow, he imagines a neat little crime that will briefly inconvenience everybody before the desired amount of money is handed over and life returns to normal. He does not understand that once violence is invited into the room it rarely plays nice. That single bad decision unleashes catastrophe. To his horror, his kindly boss, after a day or two of consideration, decides to give him the raise after all, but when Kevin tries to call off the kidnapping, he finds that the plot has already advanced a lot more than he had thought and from this point it all starts to go horribly wrong. The kidnapped girl is tortured and raped and in the process young female police officer is brutally killed at a traffic stop. Criminals murder one another. Families are destroyed and children inherit trauma. By the end, almost everybody involved is psychologically ruined even if they survive physically. The series unfolds less like a detective story than like a modern Shakespearean tragedy performed in Halifax with police radios and cups of instant coffee. Watching it, I suddenly understood Hamlet and Macbeth far better than I had in Middle School. Macbeth too begins with what appears to be a manageable crime. One routine murder to help him with a shortcut to the advancement that a man of his talents obviously deserves. One poor decision that can surely be contained, but instead, the act creates a chain reaction of paranoia, violence, guilt, and further killing that spreads outward until entire families and kingdoms are poisoned by it. In Happy Valley, the character Tommy Lee Royce functions almost like a Shakespearean villain transported into modern Yorkshire. He has something of Richard III, something of Iago, and perhaps even a little Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights. Not the romantic Heathcliff of gift-shop tea towels, but the original damaged and destructive force of nature created by Emily Brontë. A real psychopath, in fact, in modern parlance. All this is not accidental. Sally Wainwright, who wrote the show, studied at the University of York and grew up in Yorkshire. One does not grow up in that part of England without absorbing the Brontës almost through the rain itself. I myself grew up near Haworth where the Brontë girls lived at the parsonage where their father was the rector, and the landscape of Happy Valley is only a few miles away over the moors in the Calder Valley. It honestly hasn’t changed much, although admittedly horse-drawn carriages have been replaced by police driving around in battered hatchbacks. People unfamiliar with Yorkshire sometimes think these dramas exaggerate the bleakness, but they don’t. Yorkshire is not just All Creatures Great and Small with kindly vets tending to sick budgerigars and guinea pigs, and has always possessed a literary atmosphere in which ordinary life and tragedy sit very close together. A bus arrives at a bus stop. Somebody puts the teakettle on the hob. Rain falls against a dry stone wall. Meanwhile someone is being killed in the next street. During the years of the manhunt for the Yorkshire Ripper, I lived in nearby Leeds and even knew, at least by sight, one or two of the Ripper’s victims. That period taught many people in Yorkshire that terrible violence does not necessarily arrive with dramatic music and foreign accents. It can emerge from ordinary streets, ordinary pubs, ordinary men. That is what Happy Valley understands so well. The series is not about crime, it is about consequences. The great revelation for me was realizing that Shakespeare was probably never meant to feel like homework. In his own time he was closer to television. His audience wanted suspense, murder, betrayal, humor, gossip, emotion, and recognizable human weakness. They wanted to watch people make mistakes and suffer the consequences. Four hundred years later, Sally Wainwright was doing much the same thing in Yorkshire. The kings and queens have turned into accountants and police sergeants, but the tragedy of ordinary lives ruined by foolish mistakes, greed, and entitlement remains exactly the same.                “Alas, poor Yorick, I knew him well.”. — W. Shakespeare, Hamlet, 1599. 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