Greg Dixon: Less is more on screen

Sarah Lancashire shows a bit of northern grit in Happy Valley.

So here it is: after chewing it around for a bit (a short bit), after kicking it around with friends and colleagues for a bit more (a short bit more) and, after realising how unbelievably boring it can be when TV shows go on and on and on and on, I've come to the conclusion that series with a maximum of 10 or maybe a dozen episodes are where it's at.

Now obviously there are exceptions to this rule: Breaking Bad, The Sopranos and probably half a dozen others in recent memory.

But exceptions aside, this law of television makes it much easier to spot shows that are the devil's spawn. The sort of stuff that drags on and on and on and that everyone involved in the making of should be horribly done away with for foisting it on us at all. Nightmarish stuff like My Kitchen Rules and the execrable The Block, both of which seem to run for 45,678 episodes apiece.

All of which makes TV One's new Sunday night dramas, Happy Valley (8.30pm), a British copper drama, and Aussie thriller Secrets and Lies (9.40pm), perfectly good telly. Neither would qualify for your television-of-the-year list, but they are no-fuss programmes you know are not going to take a million years to get to whodunnit. Both are just six parts, though apparently a second series of the former is planned.

Of the two, Happy Valley is more my speed: a rain-sodden, rather gloomy plod drama set "awp noorf" where misery always has company.

Sarah Lancashire, who some may recognise from her five-year stint as Raquel Watts on Corrie St in the 90s, is Catherine Cawood, a 40-something police sergeant in the Yorkshire valleys.

She's divorced and lives with her grandson and her sister, a former heroin addict. In last weekend's first episode we learned two terrible things: the first was that Catherine's 18-year-old daughter Rebecca was raped and fell pregnant about eight years before.

The second was that Rebecca committed suicide after the birth of the baby.

The man who did this crime, but who was sent to prison for another offence, is now back on the streets of Catherine's not particularly happy valley and is now involved in a kidnapping that looks like it's going to go awfully wrong.

Lancashire is the key to this being a good watch with her life-is-a-right-bastard-but-I-laugh-in-his-face performance sitting just on the right side of too-dour-to-be-doing-with.

Secrets and Lies meantime also involves a horrible crime: while out jogging house painter Ben Gundelach (Martin Henderson) finds the neighbour's young son murdered on a running track in nearby bush. Ben didn't do it of course (or did he?) but the first episode saw his and his family's life slowly but surely become hell.

Some of it rang true - the media pack outside the house like some godawful Greek chorus calling "did you do it, Ben, did you do it?" - while other bits didn't, like the cops apparently not taking much of an interest in Ben's dodgy house guest.

The first episode was possibly a little slow burning for me, and Henderson's lugubrious face is sort of annoying, but with only five episodes to go to find out who did the awful deed, I think I can see my way to watching until the end. Short, you see, is sweet.

- TimeOut