Picture from B.B.C. Television.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * * *

Cast: Matthew Macfadyen, Jerome Flynn, Adam Rothenberg, Patrick Baladi, Amanda Hale, Jonathon Barnwell.

Whitechapel’s one and half square miles of intrigue, disorder and death goes hand in hand with its seemingly rich neighbourhood of the city of London, even in the late Victorian era of the 1880s. In the third episode of Ripper Street, The King Came Calling, the mixture of misplaced and intolerable idolism, the flowering shoots of social reform and murder are all presented in what is in effect the best part of the series so far.

With Cholera being such a prevalent disease in the unsanitary conditions of East-End London, it was only time before the story writers used the hysteria that the rampant disease bought to all areas of life and turned it into the backdrop for another case for Detective Inspector Reid and Sergeant Bennett Drake, portrayed with some distinguished acting by Matthew Macfadyen and Jerome Flynn, to investigate a disturbing case of local terror.

With the noose tightening and with some help from the City of London police in the form of Inspector Ressler, the investigation takes in the Molly houses of the East End and the disturbing thought that early psychotic admiration and emulation are never too far away from the homes of the ordinary public who are pawns in the criminal and police games.

Others may decry the series as being a mix of the American sensationalism of programmes such as C.S.I in which the crimes are solved, not with ingenuity of police detection but through the skill of a laboratory and a melodramatic depiction of life that was hard and tough on certain sections of society. The point is the period of time was graphic, almost distasteful and brutal, a viewer only has to read the book by Judith Walkowitz, the superb City Of Dreadful Delight or Ed Glinert’s East End Chronicles to know that sexual and personal danger was rife, nothing it seems has changed in 130 years.

Ripper Street is a riveting series that has hit its stride.         

Ian D. Hall