Cycling is good for the soul. Even, it seems, the irredeemable ones. Happy Valley spoiler alert: at the start of this year, viewers of Sally Wainwright’s brilliant BBC police drama saw wrong’un-for-the-ages Tommy Lee Royce, played by James Norton, daringly escape a Leeds courtroom at the end of season three and make a discreet getaway into the Yorkshire countryside on a carbon racer.
After years languishing in jail for a string of heinous crimes in the first series, Royce suddenly found himself under sunshine in the wide-open space of an unnamed moor in a sequence of sublime beauty, at odds with leaden skies and misery that the characters experience in much of the series. He reached the summit, gulped in the wholesome rural air and surveyed, close to tears, the magnificent landscape that stretched out before him.
For a moment, a serenity had enveloped this most twisted of characters. Cycling in the great outdoors, the scene revealed, had the ability to clear your head and bring equilibrium, whether you’d had a tough day in the office or
