As Happy Valley returns to the BBC, I’m put in mind of the final episode of the second season of that work of televisual genius. Sgt Catherine Cawood, as she reflects on the gory sequence of murder and attempted suicide she has uncovered at an isolated Yorkshire farmhouse, dryly observes that it is an “an everyday story of country folk”. It is an obvious gesture towards Ambridge; not least since Sally Wainwright, creator of Happy Valley, began her scriptwriting career on the Archers. Be that as it may, Borsetshire as we know it has been entirely free from child abuse, incest, murder and rape this month. Not everything has been delightful, mind: Ben Archer, who has been going downhill rapidly since Chelsea Horrobin had her termination, had a psychotic episode on the village green. Luckily for him, acute mental healthcare in Borsetshire seems in miraculously better nick than any other part of the UK, and the lad seems on the mend for now. Fallon, high priestess of the Ambridge tea room, has the kind of honeyed voice and sexy manner that puts me in mind of Nigella Lawson’s description of the desired texture for a pannacotta: “soft, warm and voluptuous – like an 18th-century courtesan’s inner thigh”. I imagine 17-year-old George Grundy spent a lot of December staring into the tempting depths of her mesmeric, pearlescent decolletage during all those private singing lessons she gave him to bring him up to speed for her choir. Until, to his shame, his father and uncle, by way of some quite alarming sheep-farming metaphors, warned him off his unsuitable infatuation. As his crush sours, I expect he will concoct some clumsy, possibly illegal, revenge against the blameless purveyor of Lapsang and upcycled cushions. As wood began to go missing from the rewilding project, Rex Fairbrother and Kirsty turned all Scott & Bailey and trained their wildlife camera on to the logpile. So it was that Rex, reviewing the footage with Tony Archer in the Bull, witnessed Ed Grundy caught in the act of nicking wood, and then, and I apologise for this, indulging in an activity with a female accomplice that might best be described as dogging-adjacent rather than logging-adjacent. As with the Polaroids in the divorce case against the Duchess of Argyll, you couldn’t see the faces; at any rate, it turned out that the woman on the tape definitely wasn’t Fallon, who was too busy training up her choir to find time for illicit hanky panky in the woods. In her mother Jolene’s rival chorus, Adil Shah and Lily Pargetter developed so much mutual loathing, and yet sang so sweetly together, that there must surely be romance in the offing.