Lockdown, Lowdown… Ringside Report Looks Back at the TV Show Ripper Street (2012)

By Donald “Braveheart” Stewart

In British crime history there is nothing more evocative than Jack the Ripper. Jack was the man who stalked the streets of Whitechapel in late Victorian London, that has spawned theory after theory as to his identity as he was never caught. It has drawn attention and theories from a plethora of people who claim to know exactly who he was, though none have definitive proof.

Those theorists have included pointing the finger at world famous painters, a member of the British Royal Family, a surgeon who might have been too handy with a scalpel… and many, many more… What is not a theory is that the fear he inspired was real as his crimes were horrendous and thus the fascination with him was complete. And the police, never caught him, never identified him and never escaped the storylines in the future that dwelt heavily upon their inability to catch him.

But what about the afterwards?

Once he stopped killing, did the police find themselves under greater public scrutiny because of their failures? They were, after all, not that old and the Peelers, so called because they were formed into one unit by former Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel, came under as great scrutiny then as they are now. The difference between the two, is that in the 19th Century they were fighting to find a homicidal maniac, and now they are in the media for investigating a few parties at the Prime Minister’s residence during lockdown…

You can make your own comparisons.

Into that in 2012 came Ripper Street.

The genius of this series was that it took the time of fear and turned it to their advantage. We were in Ripper territory. There was a police force with rough and ready methods which included beating suspects for a confession. We had the quintessential English actor in Mathew McFadyen at its head, backed up by the rough and tumble of Jerome Flynn who was to be the muscle and the working class foil. It was a heady mixture.

Running for 5 series and 37 episodes, this BBC program ran from its arrival in 2012 all the way to 2016. It saw one of the leads move to TV hit, Succession and the other having to fit it in in whilst filming Game of Thrones…

The premise was simple enough.

Set in H Division these police, led by detective Inspector Edmund Reid (played by McFadyen) and Sergeant Bennet Drake (played by Flynn) are joined by a former US Army surgeon who was once a Pinkerton agent, Captain Homer Jackson (played by Adam Rothenberg). He added color to the crime fighting trio who form an unlikely and unorthodox alliance, brought together, in the first series, to solve a series of baffling murders involving women victims. You can imagine what the streets of London thought…

To complicate matters, Jackson stays in a brothel, kept by Long Susan, (played by Myanna Buring) who came with Jackson from the States. One of the biggest narrative arcs involves how Long Susan cheats the hangman’s noose and Jackson is complicit in the affair. We also have Bennet losing his wife and the attendant descent into depression. To top it all the press, a frequent critic of the police at the time has Fred Best (played by David Dawson) as company for the dynamic principals, as Reid and his wife Emily, (played by Amanda Hale) appear childless but actually have one daughter, thought lost. She was believed drowned – Best the newspaper man, knows a secret about that alleged death. As the series develops, we discover he had a secret of his own too. There were quite a number of very interesting storylines centered around each character as they clashed and intrigued in equal measure. The first series was set about five or six months after the Jack the Ripper murders as our extended team began with a highly complex case they must solve.

One of the biggest they had to solve was not a plotline but their very own survival when, after the second series, it was announced that the show had been cancelled. Negotiations between the producers Tiger Aspect and LoveFilm saw them follow the Netflix/Arrested Development model. Amazon Prime then agreed to air it and the BBC relented once all of the funding model and distribution deals were on the table. It hit BBC2, having started on BBC1 and went across to the US on BBC America.

Low viewing figures may have jeopardized the darn thing but once it was out and about for the third series a fourth and fifth were slated, filmed and broadcast.

With the first series concentrating on our characters and establishing them, by series two it had a true historical focus with episodes making reference to the issues of the day from Chinese migration to The Elephant Man, Joseph Merrick. Series three took a really fascinating turn as a train crash becomes the principal focus. The investigation is an uncomfortable one for the dynamic team and Long Susan finds herself implicated. To add to the interest of our characters, Mathilda is returned to the family – though not as straightforwardly as that sounds!

Series four continued to develop the themes as the interest in surprising fashion as Reid was now retired but the lure of Whitechapel is strong, and he returns to investigate what appears like a wrongful conviction: of a rabbi by an alleged Gollum. A successful and standard trope sees him clash with many in his former police station, not least Drake who is now the man in charge. Long Susan also makes her date with the hangman.

Series five was a bit of a muddle.

Drake is gone, Reid is in hiding, the true Gollum needs exposed, whilst his keeper and accomplice, a high ranking policeman has to be exposed too. It became a little cat and mouse and lost the edge of the previous series. There was a point where credulity was stretched even for me.

But it remains one of the best examples of how the backstory of Jack the Ripper can be turned to its advantage. Instead of simply taking that as your focus, take it as the point you launch from. It made the whole series begin well, though end, less plausibly. There was a peak to it, around series three/four which brought me flooding back to the fifth which is testimony to its strength as an excellent example of its own genre!

British television is a curious affair. Begun through the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) it is funded through the universal license fee. In essence, if you wanted to watch the television , you had to pay the license fee. The BBC got it all and is state run, albeit at arms-length. Then came along commercial television in the form of the Independent Television (ITV) in 1955. Designed to bring a bit of competition to the BBC, it was paid for through advertising but still free to air… well they didn’t add another license fee to it. By the time that I was born, 1965, there was BBC1, BBC2 and ITV. And that was it. It was still years before Bruce Springsteen would moan that there were 55 channels and nothing on but here in the UK, we kept this going until in 1982, we added a fourth channel and in 1997, a fifth. With sparkling imagination, they were called Channel Four and ehm Channel Five… In between came Sky and we understood what Springsteen meant. And so, my childhood and leading up to early adulthood we had three options… But the programs made were exceptionally good. And so, here is some critical nostalgia as the lockdown has brought a plethora of reruns, new formats and platforms and old classics trying to make their way back into our consciousness as broadcasters flood their schedules with classics… or are they classics at all? Let me take you through an armchair critics’ view of what we have to see, to find out… Welcome to the Lockdown Lowdown…