Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

Cast: Matthew Macfadyen, Jerome Flynn, Adam Rothenberg, MyAnna Buring, Lucy Cohu, David Threlfall, David Warner, Rob Compton, Owen Teale, Anna Burnett, Jonas Armstrong, Jack McEvoy, Anna Koval, Matthew Lewis, Jake Mann, Charlene McKenna, Karl Murphy, Benjamin O’ Mahony.

Nothing much has changed in football, there has always been the odd case of corruption, of players being disloyal to the team, of bitter rivalries and even more bitter jealousies; murder though, that it quite new and usually appears in the form of a drug cartel’s anger over a particular player’s actions on the field of play.

Football was still in its infancy during the period when the spectre of Jack The Ripper haunted the area of Whitechapel, Football was a sport being urged upon and fostered by the working classes to get them out of the foundries and work places of a weekend and away from the public houses; swapping exercise for the slow poison of habitual drinking, to become men of iron and will, not of loose and dreadful smoke.

The fourth episode of Ripper Street’s fourth series, Men of Iron, Men of Smoke ties in two stories in a fascinating way, the murder of a young promising footballer and the return of a young man to Whitechapel to whom Inspector Drake saved from the gallows eight years previous; both men’s futures tied and bound in a chance meeting at the iron factory, both men’s outcomes will tear a division between Drake and the returned Inspector Reid.

The makers of Ripper Street have been outstanding in their details of day to day life in the heart of East End London and in this episode, with the backdrop of football at the story’s core, the writers and cast are given scope to understand that the area, though blighted by many an accusation of being the worst place to live within the British Empire, was in many ways a place in which the populace looked out for each other; they may have been the subject of many a murder hunt within their midst but they had a wholesome quality that could not be found in the areas of the West End.

It is this realism, this aspect of life away from the main through roads that led people out to the coast, that captures the eye in Men of Iron, Men of Smoke, that not every offering of a second chance is taken with good grace and that in the end, jealousy notwithstanding, men and their ways never truly part.

Ian D. Hall