The Yorkshire Ripper Files: A Very British Crime Story (BBC4) | iPlayer
Road to Brexit (BBC Two) | iPlayer
Victoria (ITV) | itv.com
Baptiste (BBC One) | iPlayer
Film-maker Liza Williams had obviously started work on The Yorkshire Ripper Files long before the recent unconscionable slayings in Christchurch, after which the New Zealand premier, Jacinda Ardern, refused to grant the perpetrator the billboarding of notoriety. Williams went some welcome way towards a very similar point, though, when, in her hefty, three-night trawl through the so-sad blood and grit of the ripper’s Leeds spree of the late 1970s, the name of Peter Sutcliffe hardly got a look-in.
Instead, the emphasis was firmly, and correctly, on Wilma McCann, Emily Jackson and the subsequent 11 women slaughtered – hammer to the skull, repeated stabbing by screwdriver – in the Bradford/Huddersfield/Halifax areas between 1975 and 1980. Sadly, we also got too many headshots of the victims – Williams had dug deep for new photographs, but people just didn’t take them in those days. One thing I’ll grudgingly grant the rise of the selfie is that there’s less chance today of any woman gazing out from our papers in perennial monochrome victimhood, as if in a smeary police lineup in the rain.
In a way, these were well-worn territories. What was different about The Yorkshire Ripper Files was that it showed there is, indeed, a new way to tell an old story. True crime, one of the televisual genres hugely on the rise at the moment, need not focus solely on the egos and psychopathies of the (male) spree-killer alone. Instead, finally, we had some small insights into the lives, loves, travails and fleeting, gossamer-thin happinesses of lives lived by women, some of them sex workers, of those areas, those times. Dear God, but they are awful stories, and I’d refer you, too, to David Peace’s Red Riding Trilogy, as superbly written and evoking similarly a (rather different) specific area and time as James Ellroy’s LA Quartet.
The rampant casual misogyny, the sleeting cold, the poverty, the savagely misnomered bars (the “Gaiety”. Really?), and, of course, the police mistakes. Heaven preserve us from the “blunt Yorkshireman”, often shorthand for just obdurate, stubborn, borderline thick. The likes of George Oldfield and Dick Holland were led astray for two whole years by hoaxer “Wearside Jack” (John Samuel Humble), who to my mind should still be in chokey. He wasn’t just having a giggle at the fumblings of the police: his aggrandising misdirection – the Yorkshire squads accumulated so much paperwork they had to strengthen their floorboards – freed Sutcliffe, now off the radar, to commit at least three further murders.
With grand input from such clear-eyed thinkers as the ever-sparky journalist Joan Smith, this fine documentary also reminded us how toxic were our attitudes in those days, when there could still be a split in the public mind between “deserving” and “innocent” victims; when local newspapers would routinely run pieces such as “The Hazards of the Job – by a Whore”; where police could order a curfew on women who “went out at night”, how very dare they. Ultimately, however, I admit to finding myself, a little surprisingly, hugely heartened, and at the simple speed of change.
Not just in policing – that era’s errors led to the setting up of the first Holmes cross-referencing system – but in society’s attitudes. Not only did the curfew lead directly to Reclaim the Night marches, and the first stirrings of fightback feminism in Yorkshire against domestic abuse and worse, but I’m fairly sure not even the most rheumy old un-woke gammon would today cede their precious bar space to anyone who thinks someone who chooses to be a sex worker deserves to be harmed.
I loved… bits… of the Road to Brexit, a spirited if ultimately futile half-hour attempt to rip the remaining bejesus out of that political fiasco, in the week Theresa May (favourite sportsman: Geoffrey Boycott. See above, under “obdurate”) had told us, 180 times, we were hog-certain slated to leave. Wisely I think Arthur Mathews and Matt Berry had chosen to go not the way of satire but of surreality, and most of the smiles came via much misplaced archive footage – Robert Redford as Alan Johnson, say, or a plucky child in a chariot race being used to illustrate DUP charmer Arlene Foster – but the laughs didn’t exactly flow.
Berry is often sublime, and his skewering of pompous pop historians, toothachingly trendy Smug Remainers, sinister Tory bigots, hit in hindsight more targets than I’m giving the programme credit for. But, in the end, no spectacle can compete for humour with the one unspooling before our eyes nightly. A theatre of the absurd, on loop, performed with increasing ineptitude by children who drink, after which one retires hurt to crisp clean sheets, yet carrying the faint, damp whiff of rhinoceros shit.
Funny and wise was the return of The Good Fight to Amazon Prime. This multilayered examination of current America has been undeservedly overlooked in the rush to garland the niche and the on-trend. Instead it quietly gets on with the job, diligently and with warm wit, of analysing the fraught culture wars, never far away from our own shores, of race and feminism and class.
Every episode is truly absorbing, but this opener to the third series featured among its many highlights an enlightening animated short on the concept of the non-disclosure agreements – great fun – and a fantastic diatribe from Diane (Christine Baranski), lips alone moving in the dark, as she quietly bewails: “What has happened to men? Where did the real guys go? What happened to men who were slow to anger, and responsible, and wouldn’t cry like whiny little bitches? When did Trump and Kavanaugh become our idea of an aggrieved man, quivering lips blaming everyone but themselves?”
If you prefer your message, whether it’s #MeToo, freedom of expression, racial equality or simple banal legal ethics, delivered with a modicum of subtlety and lashings of style, this is the show for you.
Victoria hasn’t quite got going yet, so I’ll wait a little. This is not a spoiler, except to people who have never opened a book in their life – the Chartists didn’t, in fact, storm the palace, leading to bloody revolution and Vicky’s head on a salver. Instead, this delightfully superior soap opera, gauzily awash with prettytude and breeches, has introduced Lord Palmerston (the ever-winning Laurence Fox) as the grit in Vicky’s oyster. Although my acting plaudits go, as ever, to Tom Hughes, for playing perhaps the most boring man to have ever bestrode the Earth – Prince Albert – and doing so in such a way as to make irredeemable boringness somehow bloody fascinating.
I’ll hugely, hugely miss Baptiste. True, this opening series lagged and backdraggled a little, and involved (again, sigh) trafficked young women, and Tchéky Karyo’s overponderous title character could be beatifically wearing. But as long as he has some such phenomenal presence as Tom Hollander for balance (my, what a last few years he’s had – leaves you thinking of his breakout Rev as almost surplice to requirements, excuse the little joke), he and Baptiste’s writers richly deserve a further outing.
