You wait years for a TV drama about a powerful, complex woman, and then…

This has been a great week for women on TV. The intoxicating combination of Sally Wainwright (screenwriter) and Sarah Lancashire (star) knocked it out of the park with their magnificent conclusion to Happy Valley on BBC One, while ITV released the hugely entertaining Nolly with Helena Bonham Carter.

Well, technically that was the week before. Or, depending on how you define “ITV”, hasn’t happened yet. Nolly was released onto ITVX, which is the new and terrible name for ITV Hub. ITV Hub was rather a good name for their version of iPlayer; why they had to rebrand it at all is a mystery, never mind making it sound like a porn channel. How disappointing for anyone who tuned into this three-part drama assuming Helena Bonham Carter would be doing sex scenes. Nobody got their Nollies out at all.

Anyway, ITVX is the new ITV Hub, and the new policy is to release whole series onto the Hub, sorry X, as a sort of box set, either with adverts or without them if you pay a subscription fee, and then they show the series in the old, normal, weekly way on ITV1 (or, if you’re over 40, “ITV”) a few months later.

So, a few months from now, people will be telling you that Nolly is a new series on ITV1. Or ITV. But it’s currently available on ITVX. This makes it really hard to know when we’re all supposed to talk about it. One of the loveliest things about Happy Valley’s final series has been the old-school way we’ve all waited for the Sunday night instalments and enjoyed them collectively. We knew we had to watch the finale last Sunday if we didn’t want spoilers, and then we didn’t 
feel guilty talking about it on Monday morning. When ITVX streams its first big crime series, six months before the weekly ITV1 slot, it’ll be an etiquette minefield.

Anyway, the double act of Wainwright and Lancashire is thrilling to watch, like sunset over the Amazon, even though only one of them is literally on screen. What must it feel like for the writer to know she has turned out a script of such dramatic complexity and nuance, then see it interpreted by a performer of such subtlety and power?

There was a scene in the middle of the series where Sgt Catherine Cawood is accused of racist bullying by a young male Pc she’s pranked into applying for a job keeping the public safe from UFOs. We see her feeling three things at once: the scorn of any older police officer staring derisively across a generational divide; rage that this is being taken seriously by bosses who have cared nothing about long-term sexual harassment in the force; and deep sadness because she’s just heard of the death of a woman who’d been suffering domestic abuse. This is incredibly strong, brave, edgy feminist writing. And just to make it Shakespearean: we, the viewers, are simultaneously feeling sorry for the likable Asian policeman who raised the misguided complaint.

Throw in the majesty of the final scenes – which I won’t describe in detail in case you haven’t watched yet, but the way in which it refuses to deliver the obvious denouement, subverting the form with a combination of creative radicalism and deep human truth – and you get television as a high art form, up there with Our Friends in the North.

Nolly isn’t in that category, but the two shows make fascinating companion pieces. Noele Gordon, the former Crossroads star and eponymous… heroine? Anti-hero?... is presented initially as a monster. A glorious monster, all bouffant hair and fur coat packed with vanity, but monstrous nonetheless. Over the course of the series, vulnerability is revealed and sympathy aroused – we end up seeing her monstrousness as only a reflection in the eyes of misogynist men – though I’m not so sure. Miriam Margolyes tells a story in her autobiography about being barked at by Noele Gordon for sitting in her chair (“We reckoned she only had the job because she was sleeping with the boss of the channel,” observes Margolyes tartly) and Miriam Margolyes is certainly not a misogynist man.

But it’s all so incredibly appetising as a mise-en-scène. The beguiling glamour of that era of TV, when the stars were such self-conscious stars, puffing on their cigarette holders through the windows of their Rolls-Royces; wonderful recreations of 1980s Chinese meals and traffic-free streets and ludicrous soap sets; and a delightful turn from Mark Gatiss as Larry Grayson.

I never really watched Crossroads, but I saw Acorn Antiques and understood it through that barely magnified lens. Looking up the original on YouTube, it is almost limitlessly funny to see how long they managed to sustain a conversation about the intricate workings of a motel. I mean, decades. And who even knows what a motel is?

Perhaps the line between monster and hero is always blurred in depictions of powerful women. Sgt Catherine Cawood isn’t easy. She is unforgiving, sarcastic and blunt. She snubs carefully planned leaving parties, including her own. Her troubled grandson says, in a moment of desperate need, that he loves her, and she replies with a snort. And she really humiliated that poor young male Pc. But she’s wonderful, wonderful, and the creative double act that built her is wonderful as well.

Happy Valley would be a great answer to that currently vexed question, “What is a woman?”. I have all the same biological bits and bobs as Catherine Cawood, and presumably Sarah Lancashire and Sally Wainwright as well, but I still look at them and think: “I want to be one of those.”