Episode 1

Kevin Weatherill is an accountant, and that is the most respectable thing about him. He works for Nevison Gallagher, his late father's best friend, and when Nevison refuses to pay Kevin's daughter's school fees, money Kevin believes he is owed, Kevin decides on a kidnapping. It is a bad idea, and he goes about it badly: he recruits local thugs Ashley Cowgill and Tommy Lee Royce to take Nevison's daughter Ann. The scheme backfires almost before it gets going.

But Catherine Cawood's week is worse, and her story is the one that matters. She is a police sergeant in a small West Yorkshire town with a drug culture that seems impossible to tackle. At home she lives with her sister, a recovering heroin addict, and raises her eight-year-old grandson Ryan. A meeting with Ryan's teacher about the boy's behaviour turns into something harder: Catherine explains that Ryan's mother was raped by Tommy Lee Royce and killed herself shortly after giving birth. Catherine has been the boy's sole guardian ever since. Sarah Lancashire plays the scene with a flat, tired calm, the calm of someone who has told this story before and hated it more each time.

The episode closes with an anxious Kevin walking into Catherine's police station to report the kidnapping, then losing his nerve at the last minute and walking back out.

Sally Wainwright wrote it, and Euros Lyn directed. Lancashire is the engine of the whole hour as Catherine, with Steve Pemberton's Kevin, Sophie Rundle as young PC Kirsten McAskill and Hannah John-Kamen as Justine. Moey Hassan, Pauline Jefferson, Ben Wright, Phil Featherstone, James Burrows and Nadia Nadry fill out the town.

It is a quiet first episode, all groundwork and no fireworks, and it trusts the viewer to keep up. The secrets here have been kept too long, and everybody in the valley knows it.