“You’ve got me all wrong, you old bitch,” Tommy Lee Royce shouted at Catherine Cawood in last night’s nerve-shredding Happy Valley finale. Clutching a knife wound and slowly bleeding out, the fugitive was in the most vulnerable state we’ve ever seen him. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry I didn’t treat Becky any better.” Wait. Was West Yorkshire’s most evil resident… repenting? Was he… not quite as rotten as we thought?
It’s a testament to the genius of Sally Wainwright’s writing that many viewers of last night’s last ever episode had the unexpected – and deeply uncomfortable – experience of feeling sorry for Tommy Lee Royce. James Norton’s masterful, layered performance only added to the apparent switch in his character’s raison d’etre.
Until this point, Tommy had wanted Catherine dead, yet there he was — having already stopped himself from setting her house on fire — sat at her kitchen table, not even attempting to take her on. When he doused himself in petrol, muttering about not wanting to go back to prison, he even advised Catherine not to use her taser. “Believe it or not, I don’t want you to get done!”
This Tommy had been changed by knowing his son, we were to believe. Given half the chance to be a dad, to know Ryan as he’d grown up, Tommy would have fulfilled his potential as the decent man he ludicrously thought himself to be. It’s a warped vein of thinking Neil (himself unable to see his sons thanks to his divorce and past addiction struggles) evidently fell for, and perhaps part of the reason he was so keen to take Ryan to visit his dad in prison.
Happy Valley has always been about bad men, the horrendous damage they do to women and how they far too frequently get away with it. Giving Tommy a sob story was a slyly brilliant move from Sally Wainwright: it toyed with its audience’s sympathies, ultimately laying bare just how willing society is to forgive the unforgivable actions of these violent men. We see it in the discussion around violence against women all the time; domestic abusers and killers are “family men” and “good blokes” who had an uncharacteristic outpouring of rage (coincidentally also the line Rob Hepworth tried to spin when he told detectives that he “wasn’t a violent person normally” right after admitting to physically abusing his wife). But there should be no excusing men who have caused this much pain.
However, people like Tommy Lee Royce are brilliant at making us second guess ourselves and it’s no surprise that so many viewers found a soft spot for him in his final scenes. His outpouring of emotion was the work of a master manipulator, with his belief that Catherine needed forgiveness from him, rather than the other way round, laying bare his twisted logic in which he cast himself as the victim. Wainwright’s fleeting humanisation of such a monster only made the murders, rapes and many other crimes he had committed more chilling.
More on Happy Valley
Catherine (performed with stunning venom by Sarah Lancashire) was having none of Tommy’s narcissism disguised as selflessness. “You delinquent fuck,” she spat. “You have no idea what you did to Becky … You crippled her. You reduced her to nothing with your endless, endless abuse and your nasty little threats.” Earlier she had reminded him of his past: “Are you not the freak that murdered Kirsten Mcaskill? That raped and traumatised Ann Gallagher? That kicked the shit out of me so that I was four weeks in hospital?”
Ah yes, that’s why we hate Tommy Lee Royce. For almost a decade he has been one of TV’s most abhorrent villains, ruining lives even when he was behind bars. After playing with our loyalties for a moment and nodding to how readily we still make excuses for men’s crimes, Sally Wainwright gave us a much-needed reality check via Catherine’s unflagging refusal to tolerate bullshit. Our heroine would not forgive the “braindead psychopath”, and neither should we.