The dust is starting to settle after the tense ending to everyone’s favourite police drama the BBC’s Happy Valley, which drew to a conclusion on Sunday night.
We saw a tense confrontation between Catherine Cawood and Tommy Lee Royce. The ending gained a positive reaction from fans of the show, which is commended with many shows causing frustration for viewers.
It was said before the finale that Sarah Lancashire who of course plays Catherine, influenced a change to the first draft of the ending, with Sally Wainwright, writer of the show changing the ending.
Wainwright spoke about this revelation in an interview with the Metro where she explained how Lancashire voiced her concerns about the end which led to it being changed.

Wainwright said: “Sarah is to thank for that ending, in many ways, because I wrote the first draft, and everybody seemed quite happy with it and then she made it clear that she wasn’t happy with it.”
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“The Christmas before she came up to my house, and she spent all day talking about it and she gave me some really good notes. So everything got pushed a bit further in that episode and it was all thanks to Sarah.”
The Happy Valley writer continued: “It was a great privilege to have the opinion of someone who knew the scripts almost better than I do because she put so much into it, so much thought into it.”
Describing their discussion Sally said: “It was a really fabulous conversation — she was literally here all day at my house. And we just spent all day really talking it through and it is nice that we kind of worked it through together. Her performance is just off the scales,” Wainwright said.
Actors can sometimes know the script in more detail Wainwright explained as they get into the “granular details” in regards to their character’s journey which allowed Lancashire’s honest assessment of the original ending.
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