Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
Cast: Matthew Macfadyen, Jerome Flynn, Adam Rothenberg, MyAnna Buring, David Wilmot, Damien Molony, Leanne Best, David Dawson, Frank Harper, Peter Sullivan, Frank McCafferty, Jassa Ahluwalia, Dale Leadon Bolger, Gillian Saker, Stephen Jones, Kirsty Oswald, Alexander Cobb, David Crowley, Scott Handy, Alfie Stewart, Bella Stewart-Wilson, Andrew Tieman, David Walsh.
The way that Ripper Street has incorporated the life of Detective Inspector Reid and his surroundings of Whitechapel, London and given the audience that watch this ever increasing popular programme a lesson in some of the more historical emergences of the time is never anything but gratifying.
The series has never shied away from showing the grim reality of the Victorian London borough that still has the power to transfix a person walking through its streets a 125 years after one of its most horrific scenes of bloodshed and gruesome discovery. Whether it is the plight of the women who inhabit life outside of the city of London, the squalid, almost rank hypocrisy of one rule for those who live along the realms beyond The Tower of London to the West and those who inhabit the dark narrow confines of alleyways and tight festering, inadequate, housing to the East or even those whose taste in love in Victorian England was not just frowned upon but brutality dealt with, all human life comes back to the East-End.
In Threads of Silk and Gold, the latest episode of Ripper Street, the action centres on those who sought pleasure in the rent boy, the fiscal shift that was bought about by the collapse of the Argentinian economy and the marrying together of these two stories that saw Barings Bank at the centre of it all.
For the Victorian observer, not only was the thoughts of Jack the Ripper still paramount in the minds of its citizens as the 19th Century reaches its last decade, but all the tales of corruption, of so called Victorian values that came crashing down in misdeeds such as the Cleveland Street Scandal.
The telegraph system which employed young boys as runners must have seemed like a Heaven sent opportunity to those in certain positions of power to have illicit sex with many a lad, but what happens when those being abused for such power start to kick back and deal in the criminal act of blackmail and then murder. This was the dilemma for Inspector Reid; making an offence out of human love could only lead to more instances of a more serious crime taking place.
It is no use pretending that Victorian attitudes by today’s standards were one that quite frankly were enough to make a modern day viewer almost sick to their stomach but it did happen, the way in which Jerome Flynn and Adam Rothenberg as Detective Sergeant Drake and Captain Homer Jackson could not disguise their ill feeling to the testimony of a young gay man was perfectly captured for the resentment that many in the young man’s shoes must have felt.
As with the episode Become Man, the air of the distasteful aroma of the past, the way a so called civilisation reacted to something that was new can confuse the mind, however in such things modern drama excels in holding a mirror up to ourselves and asking what we as a species, a country, as a person find unattractive today, in years to come we will also be held to account for.
Threads of Silk and Gold is a great episode which once more lowered the mask on a society that was supposed to be a gleaming pillar of respectability.
Ian D. Hall