Happy Valley series 3: full cast and how to watch BBC One drama, why was there a delay between series?

The multi-BAFTA award winning Happy Valley, starring Sarah Lancashire, is set to make its final return to BBC One on New Year’s Day as Sergeant Catherine Cawood discovers the remains of a gangland murder victim in a drained reservoir. This sparks a chain of events that leads her straight back to Tommy Lee Royce, played by James Norton.

Cawood’s grandson, Ryan (played by Rhys Connah), is now 16 and has ideas of his own about the kind of relationship he wants to have with the man Catherine refuses to acknowledge as his father, leaving Catherine’s sister Clare (Siobhan Finneran) caught in the middle. In another part of the valley, a local pharmacist gets in over his head when a neighbour is arrested, the official BBC synopsis has revealed.

Penned by Sally Wainwright, the show once again takes place in the Calder Valley - with the Yorkshire theme commonplace in the television writers work. Wainwright, a Yorkshirewoman herself, found critical acclaim with her series before Happy Valley, the award winning Last Tango in Halifax.

Explaining the show to uninitiated audiences through the BBC, Wainwright explained Happy Valley “is not a police show, it’s a show about Catherine, who happens to be a police officer. It’s not a police procedural, it’s not a crime show. It’s really about Catherine and about what happened to her in the past and this weird crooked relationship she has with this man who affected her life so badly.