Formidable ex-constable who taught Happy Valley star Sarah Lancashire how to be a fair cop

The return of Happy Valley last weekend on BBC1 forced Lisa Farrand to look in the mirror. In the first episode of series three, Sergeant Catherine Cawood is confronted by two smug male detectives who dismiss her ability to identify a dead body. As she walks away, she says: “I’ll leave it with you. Twats.”

“Everybody said, ‘That’s you’, and I said ‘I know’,” said Farrand, who is a former police officer and the inspiration for Sarah Lancashire’s no-nonsense Cawood. “Then I sat down and wondered if I am that rude to people.”

After three decades as a West Yorkshire police constable, Farrand, 60, was the ideal candidate to help make the Bafta-winning BBC1 series as realistic as possible. She works as an adviser on the show, covering everything from teaching Lancashire how to slap on handcuffs or knock on a door with authority, to telling the art department what police computer screensavers should look like. The second episode of the third series airs at 9pm tonight.

Lisa Farrand, the former police officer who is a role model for Sarah Lancashire, said the actress had to “toughen up”

It also helps that she is friends with the show’s creator, Sally Wainwright. The pair met as pupils at Triangle Church of England Primary School in Sowerby Bridge but lost touch when Farrand’s family moved to Huddersfield during the summer holidays, when she was nine. When Wainwright was plotting Happy Valley a decade ago, she asked a mutual friend if he knew any female police officers that could help advise on the show. “Sally came up to see me a couple of days later and it was like we’ve never been apart,” Farrand said.

Farrand and Wainwright are meticulous about making police procedures plausible. “Sally has this ability to defrag your brain and take all the bits out that she thinks are going to be important,” said Farrand. “She always has a notebook, even if you go out for dinner.” Wainwright shares early draft scripts with Farrand, and asks for advice on what Cawood should say and how the police operate.

Whenever Lancashire, 58, is on set, Farrand is there to help. The first thing she told the actress was that she needed to “toughen up”, because when Farrand joined the force “women were treated very differently . . . there was a lot of overt sexism”.

In last Sunday’s episode, Cawood knocks on the door of a local teacher, responding to a 999 call. Farrand’s advice was blunt: “Sarah, you’re not selling Avon. You need to go and knock on the door so he knows that you’re there. And don’t engage him in dialogue on the doorstep: as soon as he opens the door, you make your way in and take control.”

She said: “It’s those little bits of behaviour and mannerisms that you build up over time throughout your career.”

While Wainwright always “had the most amazing imagination” as a child and made up stories from a young age, Farrand did not plan to join the police. She was working as a teacher for young people with learning disabilities when she saw a piece in the local paper criticising West Yorkshire police, which, it was said, “never appointed married women with children”. The married mother saw it as a challenge: “I thought, ‘I’m gonna have some of that.’ It was a red rag to a bull,” she said.

The Bradford riots in July 2001 were a career highlight, as Farrand helped “secure a lot of convictions” while ethnic unrest flared. Shortly afterwards, she was run over by four men in the city. She was awarded the Queen’s Police Medal for Distinguished Service in the following year’s birthday honours list.

Later, when she worked the beat in Halifax, she helped to get a woman who had been taken to Pakistan against her will back home. Working in a predominantly Pakistani Muslim community, Farrand learnt to speak Urdu so that she could communicate with women in the area, particularly victims of domestic abuse, who would otherwise have to speak via an interpreter, often a member of the family.

Farrand said she admired the authority of Sarah Lancashire’s character

BBC

Farrand lives in Kirklees with her husband Richard, who was also a police constable. She has two sons, four grandchildren and one great-granddaughter.

In 2013 she injured her right hand while arresting a suspect. “The uniform doesn’t protect you one iota, particularly today when people have been taking drugs, or [violence is] alcohol-induced,” she said.

“Most people in society would not attack a police officer. But when they are filled with drugs and alcohol, you are just a blur standing in front of them trying to stop them from getting away.”

The left-handed Farrand disagreed with leaving her post, took her employer to a tribunal and won. However, she soon retired from the force.

When the first series of Happy Valley aired in 2014, Farrand did not tell any of her friends that she was involved. “I started getting text messages after the first episodes asking if I had watched it,” she said. “A lot of people said: ‘That felt like it could be you.’”

She is now more open about her involvement — and has worked as a consultant on other shows, including last year’s ITVX series Without Sin. Her real experience with sheep-rustling inspired a Happy Valley storyline in series two that culminated with dead livestock in a back garden.

Farrand would have liked Lancashire to be her beat partner. “She doesn’t even have to speak when she’s in uniform, she just commands. I’d have worked with her any day of the week.”