We’ve been obsessed with gory TV dramas and misery memoirs, but now we’ve decided it’s time to get happy

It’s dark when you wake up, the sky is grey and the news reports yet more doom and gloom. You endure 11 hours of work then make your way home via grimy, puddle-strewn streets. It’s been a terrible day but you know exactly what will cheer you up: that’s right, three straight hours of a gruesome Scandinavian drama. Because this is the thing; the country may be on its knees, the winter may be coming, but us Brits seem to take pleasure in wallowing in misery.

More than 10 million of us “had to watch” the finale of Broadchurch earlier this year to find out who strangled an 11-year-old boy. French zombie series The Returned was heralded as the greatest TV show ever made by select members of the Stylist team, and then The Fall, BBC Two’s most successful drama series in over a decade with an average audience of 4.3 million, made us all develop a major crush on a seriously warped serial killer. Here’s looking at you, Jamie Dornan.

But it’s not just what fills up the TV schedules; literature, too, has taken a turn for the positively bleak. Misery literature (or mis-lit to the moping masses) now qualifies as everyday bedtime reading. Recollections of abuse like Please Daddy No, Don’t Ever Tell and Damaged have stormed the bestseller charts (they’re even filed in a new ‘Painful Lives’ section at Waterstones). And research shows that more often than not, it’s women choosing to indulge in such grim tomes – a survey by Harper Non-Fiction suggests 85% of the genre’s readers are female. Cathy Rentzenbrink, a fiction previewer at The Bookseller magazine says, “I’ve definitely noticed this dark sub-genre emerge for strong female narrators.” Ann Cleeves, the author of the Vera crime novels, agrees, arguing that violence, particularly against women, had become “much more embedded” in Scandi books and dramas, and claimed writers were in competition with each other to be the most gruesome.

The misery backlash