The Legacy Of Catherine Cawood: A New Chapter In Sally Wainwright's Television Universe

Let us be clear about this one, seemingly trivial detail, because within it resides the entire goddamn apparatus of creative obsession. The writer, Sally Wainwright, a person who constructs whole worlds out of the mud and grim poetry of West Yorkshire, has not simply moved on. You do not just create a character like Catherine Cawood—that titan of the fluorescent jacket, that weary warrior of the rolling dales—and then let her go.

No, you let her retire to the Himalayas, a place so mythically distant it might as well be the moon, but you keep a piece of her, a relic, a bureaucratic ghost, and you pass it on. You take her collar number, 9675, a number she wore for thirty years of dealing with every conceivable human mess, and you stitch it onto the uniform of a new recruit in a new story.

A secret inheritance.

And what a new story. The beautiful, maddening absurdity of it all. Forget the grim hunt for monsters. Here are five menopausal women forming a punk rock band. Think about that. The fury of the body’s betrayal channeled into three chords and a primal scream. Joanna Scanlan, Tamsin Greig, Lorraine Ashbourne—these are not ingénues; these are women who have lived, who have seen things, and are now picking up guitars to howl about it all amid the domestic chaos of aging parents, bewildered children, and dissolving marriages.

It is a premise of such defiant, hilarious, and deeply human energy. A hot flash as a guitar solo. The profound indignity of hormonal shifts transformed into the pure, unadulterated dignity of noise, all set against the same Hebden Bridge backdrop that contained Catherine Cawood’s stoic suffering.

The genius of the connection, the passing of the numerical torch, is that it wasn’t born from some flash of literary conceit.

It came from the procedural truth, from the mouth of a police adviser named Lisa Casler, who pointed out the mundane reality of the system. When an officer retires, the number goes back into the pot. That’s it. No ceremony, no solemnity. Just an empty slot waiting for a new body. So Wainwright, in an act of quiet fidelity, gives that number, that 9675, to Officer Nisha Lal in her new series, *Riot Women*. It’s a haunting.

A whisper from one show to the next. Catherine Cawood is gone, meditating on some Nepalese peak, but her number, her official identity, is still on patrol, a tiny, four-digit echo of a legacy, forever circling the same complicated streets.