Community, Seriality, and the State of the Nation: British and Irish Television Series in the 21st Century

Caroline Lusin, Ralf Haekel

• Publisher: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9783823301356
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

Since the turn of the 21st century, the television series has rivalled cinema as the paradigmatic filmic medium. Like few other genres, it lends itself to exploring society in its different layers. In the case of Great Britain and Ireland, it functions as a key medium in depicting the state of the nation. Focussing on questions of genre, narrative form, and serialisation, this volume examines the variety of ways in which popular recent British and Irish television series negotiate the concept of community as a key component of the state of the nation.

III. Crime and Social Decline in Urban Communities

Drugs, Sheep, and Broken Lives: Dysfunctional Families, Violence, and the Subversion of Nostalgia in Happy Valley (2014-)

Caroline Lusin

Stuck in speed bump city

Where the only thing that’s pretty

Is the thought of getting out

(Jake Bugg)

1. Introduction

The title song of Sally Wainwright’s critically acclaimed crime drama Happy Valley (2014-, BBC One) offers a dreary view of life in an average British town: the speaker of Jake Bugg’s “Trouble Town” (2012)1 feels stuck in a place defined by tower blocks, benefits, police sirens, drugs, troubled homes, and delinquent youth. The overwhelming notion is one of being targeted and pursued by misfortune without any hope of “getting out”.2 The credits of Happy Valley insistently repeat the refrain to prepare the audience for a narrated world in which society is profoundly out of joint: “In this trouble town/ Troubles are found” (Bugg). Set in the Calder Valley in West Yorkshire, the show was inspired by a real-life documentary about a similar place, the picturesque market town Hebden Bridge (see White). Shocked by the suicide of several childhood friends, Jez Lewis explored the dark side of this town in Shed Your Tears and Walk Away (2009), which uncovers a gut-wrenching story of alcohol and drug abuse. In fact, the very title Happy Valley acknowledges the character of this setting as “a place whose beauty and outward placidity conceals a malaise” (Bradshaw): the area is known to the police as ‘happy valley’ because of its history of drug addiction (see White).

In Happy Valley, which won the BAFTA for Best Drama Series in 2015, Sally Wainwright uses the oblique network of the drug trade as a universal backdrop to her story. The show is centred on a longstanding conflict between uniformed police officer Sergeant Catherine Cawood (Sarah Lancashire), the protagonist, and violent thug Tommy Lee Royce (James Norton), who is said to have raped and impregnated Catherine’s teenage daughter Becky (Elly Colvin) eight years before the story starts. Shortly after the birth of her son Ryan (Rhys Connah), Becky committed suicide. Catherine’s morally courageous decision to raise Ryan, the child of Becky’s rape and thus living proof of the cause of her suicide, as part of the family instead of putting him into care, has alienated her son Daniel (Karl Davies) as well as her (former) husband Richard (Derek Riddell). In the first series, Tommy Lee Royce, just released from prison after serving eight years for drug charges, has joined petty criminal Lewis Whippey (Adam Long) in working for drug dealer Ashley Cowgill (Joe Armstrong), whose caravan park is only a cover for his far more profitable trade. At the instigation of disaffected accountant Kevin Weatherill (Steve Pemberton), the three abduct Ann Gallagher (Charlie Murphy), the daughter of Kevin’s employer Nevison (George Costigan). However, things ultimately go badly wrong, which leads to Tommy Lee Royce brutally killing both young police officer Kirsten McAskill (Sophie Rundle) and Lewis, as well as his buddy Brett (Adam Nagaitis). The series comes to a dramatic head when Tommy abducts Ryan, and Catherine only just manages to apprehend him before he kills himself and his son. The second series further develops the conflict between Catherine and Tommy, now in prison for murder, by telling the story of how he tries to reach and win over Ryan through his fiancé, who acts as a go-between. As in the first series, this conflict unfolds against the background of another crime, the brutal sexual abuse and serial murder of a number of women, including Tommy Lee Royce’s mother, and the copycat murder of blackmailing Vicky Fleming (Amelia Bullmore) by her married lover, Detective Sergeant John Wadsworth (Kevin Doyle). Clearly, it is not just the ‘scrotes’, as Catherine likes to call them, who display criminal potential in this series, but members of all classes, just as drugs are presented as a universal problem, as Catherine’s sister Clare Cartwright (Siobhan Finneran), a former addict, goes to prove.

With this bleak portrayal of contemporary Britain, Sally Wainwright has firmly inscribed her hugely successful show – the first series was watched by an average audience of 7.2 million, with 7.8 million viewers tuning in for the final episode (see “BBC One drama”) – into the tradition of British cinema and television from the North. As Kristyn Gorton argues, Northern films written in the vein of social realism typically “convey a sense of entrapment and a desire for escape” (75) by including elements like “bleakness, coldness, industry, decay, social problems, working class, exploitation, lack of serious culture” (Schmid 349, qtd. in Gorton 75). This is very much in line with Wainwright’s further work for television, which is characterised by “strong and yet struggling female characters, an interest in crime and an attention to the messiness of family life” (Gorton 78). Wainwright’s oeuvre, and Happy Valley in particular, accordingly “follows in a strong tradition of British social realism from kitchen sink drama to Coronation Street (ITV, 1960)” (ibid. 73). Like Coronation Street (1960-), which is set in Salford and centres on a working-class community, Happy Valley depicts a fairly traditional community, as it hardly displays any of the geographical mobility that has characterised social structures since the mid-20^th century.3 Still, the show evinces the social change that has taken place since the 1950s and 60s, which has largely been perceived in terms of “the loss of family and community solidarity […] combined with processes of individualization” (Charles 444). In describing these developments, Happy Valley decidedly transcends the geographical boundaries to reveal the state of the nation as a whole, as Hebden Bridge acquires “an ‘everytown’ quality, riddled with the type of social problems by which few British communities can be unaffected” (Piper, “Broadcast Drama”, 178).

Happy Valley, as the following sections will show, showcases the break-up of traditional social structures and units, like the family and the community, only to underscore the value of individual moral agency as an antidote to a society marked by violence and exploitation. Paradoxically, Catherine, the focal character of Happy Valley, counteracts the tendency towards individualism and self-centredness apparent in the entire community by acting in an individualist, profoundly emotional manner. Its strong concern with a variety of topical social issues, such as drug-abuse, unemployment, corruption, and dysfunctional families, turns Happy Valley, in the words of Helen Piper, into a prime example

of how an indigenous broadcast drama-entertainment series may be inflected to address local and national anxieties, specifically through the use of the generic and the spectacular in relation to space/place, and through the dramatization of a national institution (the police) […]. (“Broadcast Drama”, 178).

As a member of the police force, Catherine encounters a variety of serious social problems at first hand. It is particularly significant in this context that she is not, like practically all protagonists of current crime dramas, such as Luther (2010-), Vera (2011-), The Fall (2013-2016), or Broadchurch (2013-2017), a plainclothes detective employed in the CID (Criminal Investigation Department). As a uniformed officer actually working on the streets, Catherine is ideally positioned to function as a mediator between the police and the community. In fact, she is less a representative of the institution of the police than a go-between whose trademark high visibility jacket (displayed on both DVD covers) signals her pivotal function for the community. If Catherine’s yellow jacket thus visually indicates her status within the ‘trouble town’, Sally Wainwright more generally relies on visual clues of setting and landscape to place the series in the Condition of England tradition in a way that is decidedly anti-nostalgic.

2. Rural Landscapes, Nostalgia, and Industrial Heritage

Not unlike The Village (2013-2014), Happy Valley cites and positions itself against the nostalgic heritage style of many contemporary TV productions, such as Upstairs, Downstairs (2010), Parade’s End (2012), Downton Abbey (2010-2015), Lark Rise to Candleford (2008-2011), or The Paradise (2012), the latter two also featuring Sarah Lancashire.1 Rosalía Baena draws attention to how these shows are connected by “the idea of Englishness and the enactment of nostalgia for a lost time” (119), which fulfil a unifying function in the present. Linda Hutcheon and Mario Valdes hence argue that “nostalgia is less about the past than about the present” (20). Such nostalgic escapes to an idealised past, as opposed to a dissatisfying present, are closely connected to the notion of community in several ways. First of all, the past referred to mostly represents a supposedly “simpler era of ‘real’ community values” (ibid.). And secondly, in illustrating how “the visual display of English national heritage” (Baena 123) produces a feeling of nostalgia, Baena emphasises that remembering a shared history is “central to forging and maintaining a common identity” (118), and essential in creating a unifying sense of community:

Specifically, collective nostalgia can promote a feeling of community that works to downplay or deflect divisive social differences (class, race, gender and so on) […]. When nostalgia is produced and experienced collectively, it can promote a sense of ‘we’, thus serving the purpose of forging a national identity […]. (121)

From this point of view, nostalgia appears as a substitute for a feeling of community as a “‘warm’ place” (see Bauman 1) providing safety and a sense of belonging. Historically, Malcolm Chase and Christopher Shaw argue, nostalgia can therefore be considered as “a by-product of cultural modernity (with its alienation, its much lamented loss of tradition and community” (7, qtd. from Baena 120).

Through its use of the setting, Happy Valley is closely affiliated with the historical period usually associated with the loss of community, the age of industrialisation. As its settings are actually named in the film, Happy Valley spotlights landmarks of the area that clearly evoke its industrial heritage. Old industrial chimneys still mark the airline of Hebden Bridge and Sowerby Bridge shown in the series, distinctly reminding viewers of the history of these towns. Hebden Bridge used to be notable for its water-powered weaving mills, and both towns lie on the banks of Rochdale Canal, which served to transport raw materials to the industrial centre of Manchester. Britain’s extensive network of narrow canals, which was built between 1760 and the 1830s (see Stinshoff 265), is intricately linked to the Industrial Revolution, as it represents “the first nationwide standardised system of transport infrastructure” (ibid. 257). Before the arrival and rise of the railway, the canals “developed into the most important transport routes for heavy bulk commodities of the incipient industrial revolution: coal, iron ore, limestone, gravel, stones, timber, grain, but also cotton, pottery and other manufactures” (ibid. 264). Rochdale Canal plays a crucial role in the story when Tommy hides on a narrow boat on the canal at Hebden Bridge after committing the triple murder and finally lures Ryan to his hiding place, where the showdown of the first series takes place. The fact that the establishing aerial shot of the series shows Sowerby Bridge, then, is certainly not just biographically motivated (Sally Wainwright grew up in Sowerby Bridge, see Cocozza); the shot is framed in a way characterising the entire series (see fig. 1):

Fig. 1: Aerial shot of Sowerby Bridge (S1/E, 00:01).

The 19^th-century railway bridge running through the centre evokes the expansion of the railway as a key factor in the rise of industrial Britain. While the foreground is covered by old working-class accommodation, a garage, and sheds, the background features a church spire – a traditional signifier of community – as well as the rolling, rugged hills of the Calder Valley, all steeped in bright sunlight after the rain. This visual juxtaposition of industrial and working class heritage with the uplifting, wide view of rural scenery, which also features in the credits, is typical of the setting in the show. In this contrastive use of Britain’s industrial, working-class heritage, Happy Valley differs distinctly from a show like Coronation Street, which represents a “nostalgic celebration of a typical northern English community threatened by modernity” (Schmid 357). In Happy Valley, the warm feeling of community is already a thing of the past.

In between or as part of the scenes, Happy Valley again and again features picturesque rural landscape scenes that lend the show a distinctively British flavour. On the surface, Happy Valley thus shares the preference for exterior long shots of rural landscapes which distinguishes British heritage productions (see Baena 124). In films like Downton Abbey, rural life typically features as one of the key elements of English heritage (see ibid. 126), promoting “an ideal of Englishness as a lost pastoral locus, mythologized, missed and longed-for” (ibid. 119). As Helen Piper notes, “almost all domestically produced drama (not least, police/crime fiction) also feeds the national territorial imagination”, adding that “[i]t may also do so through the inclusion of landscape spectacle” (“Broadcast Drama”, 176). However, the landscape shots in Happy Valley...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Titel
• Impressum
• Inhaltsverzeichnis
• Acknowledgements
• ‘This is England’: Community, the State of the Nation, and Seriality in Contemporary British and Irish Television Series
• I. Family, Morality, and Communal Cohesion
• II. Nostalgia and the Search for Community
• III. Crime and Social Decline in Urban Communities
• IV. Vice and Virtue in Capitalist Communities
• Fußnoten