Feeling Northern:'Heroic Women' in Sally Wainwright's Happy Valley (BBC One, 2014-)

This article analyses a recent television drama written by Sally Wainwright in order to explore notions of Northernness, gender and class. I consider to what extent Wainwright is expanding and revising current perceptions of the North, and more specifically of Northern women, through an analysis of her recent television programme, Happy Valley. Wainwright’s work shares characteristics of the British social realist television drama from the late 50s, early 60s: they have themes of escape, they use location to say something about their characters and they take viewers on an emotional journey that is related to the social conditions they inhabit. And yet, she is also putting women, who were often on the periphery of social drama, in the centre. Wainwright takes her viewers on a journey that begins with the anger and injustice resonant with the male protagonists of social realism, but as women, this anger and injustice is worked through in terms of the family and eventually leads to a greater sense of commitment to community and the place she comes from, which, in Wainwright’s work, is the North. In so doing, she expands the genre and gives it a female voice. She offers us a sense of what ‘feeling’ Northern is to women, as well as men. Additionally, she is a screenwriter who is speaking from the position of the working-class North; she is intimate to these communities, not a ‘detached observer.’ And yet, despite these inroads, her work has only recently received praise from the British television Industry.