Sally Wainwright

Since the very first episode, almost nine years ago, Tommy Lee Royce has been the byword for cold, calculating evil, not so much a man but a vessel for ...

Wainwright doesn’t ask for our hearts to bleed for Royce – though it would take a cold person not to have been moved by his desperate wish for Catherine to “be here, with Ryan”, in the knowledge that no one was ever with Royce when he was a child – but she does ask for us to observe where he came from. To offer up Tommy Lee Royce, the Beast of Calder Valley, as a human – naked, vulnerable and afraid – was Wainwright’s gift to us all. To dismiss Royce as a monster is to ignore what Wainwright has been telling us all along – huge parts of the Calder Valley (and the country as a whole) are enormously deprived, riddled with drug addiction, crime and child poverty. Here, at the end, the revelation was that if his life was worth anything, it was by staying out of Ryan’s. Royce, wounded, likely defeated, found the photo albums of Ryan and Becky that Catherine had been poring over, and he had his revelation – a cyclepath to Mytholmroyd moment, if not the full road to Damascus. At the end, however, a moment – however fleeting – of redemption.