Happy Valley fans praise chat about 'stew' as the ‘highlight’ of latest episode

Warning: This article contains spoilers for series three of the BBC series Happy Valley.

Beloved writer-actor duo Sarah Lancashire and Sally Wainwright are back with the third and final series of hit BBC drama Happy Valley, and fans are already praising the gripping storytelling – especially around the specific subject of stew.

The third episode, which aired on Sunday, saw police sergeant Catherine Cawood (Lancashire) confront sister Clare (Benidorm’s Siobhan Finneran) after discovering she was secretly taking Catherine’s grandson Ryan to see his rapist father Tommy Lee Royce (Grantchester’s James Norton) in prison.

Cawood, as a reminder, isn’t too keen on Royce, after he sexually assaulted her daughter Becky, who killed herself shortly after giving birth to Ryan. Over three series the officer has desperately tried to stop Ryan from learning about – and interacting with – the man who she sees as responsible for Becky’s death.

So, when she learned Ryan had been having regular meeting with Royce, she wasn’t too happy, and pulled her grandson away from his dinner at Clare’s to offer an ultimatum on the doorstep.

“So [Royce] has a kink in his brain – a twist, a psychological deformity. It’s an absence of something that allows him to possibly seem quite normal to you, but it allows him to do things – evil things, nasty things, things that normal people just wouldn’t do, things that he’s ended up in prison for.

“Now you don’t have that kink, that absence. You have a normal brain. You are not evil.

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“So what you have to understand is…”

At this point, Ryan was getting a little impatient, saying: “You know my tea’s going cold?”

“What you having,” Catherine asked.

“Stew,” he replied.

Brushing it off, his gran continued: “That’ll be all right.”

A simple break in the conversation, sure, but Twitter users have soon hailed it a “highlight” of an episode which was also filled with police raids, an emotional confrontation, aliens (yes, really) and a shocking assault.

“That quick exchange about stew mid-life-changing revelation was just perfection,” tweeted one viewer.

Another commented: “Interjected into the most heart wrenching tense conversation ever is why Sally Wainwright is top of her game and why Sarah Lancashire’s way of delivering her lines needs all the awards.”

“The stew line. The stew line should be taught in schools. It should have a blue plaque. It should be placed in a museum, no, a travelling museum exhibit so the whole world can see the glory of the stew line,” wrote a third.

Happy Valley continues on BBC One on Sunday, 9pm.

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