‘The English at the double an' the Irish at the charge’

Henry and I have been watching Ripper Street on the BBC.  It is a great show.  If you're not a young person with a bedtime long before 9pm, I would highly recommend you catch up on the iPlayer.

Ripper Street is set in Whitechapel in 1889, six months after Jack the Ripper’s rampage ended.  Don't expect them to be re-writing history there, however: because no-one knew the Ripper would never return, tensions remain high.  It stars Matthew Macfadyen, Jerome Flynn (whom I hadn't seen on TV since Soldier, Soldier and only just recognised in episode two – what a transformation!) and Adam Rothenberg.  Fantastic writing, great actors, historically accurate even down to the height of the Victorian police force, and the best depiction of Victorian East London I've seen in a jolly long time.

I was therefore a wee tad surprised to hear what Jan Moir of the Daily Mail had to say about it.

'Who decided to make the BBC's Sunday night period drama an anti-women orgy of gore?' she practically shrieks in her headline.

How odd.  Apparently she likes 'a bit of picturesque historical gore just as much as the next woman' and saw it as a perfect replacement for Downton Abbey for her Sunday night's viewing.  She quite rightly criticises the ridiculous use of raspberry jam at the end of the Downton Christmas special, and had been looking forward to non-jam blood in a show that appeared 'to be all dark and noir-ish, and thick with the intoxicating promise of taking its viewers seriously'.  She seems positively gagging for this new show, which had been 'trailed extensively by the BBC and... looked terrific; 50 shades of sepia suffused with gaslight, rattling carriages and footpads creeping along dripping alleyways'.  She seems also to have a crush on Macfadyen.

Silly woman.  Don't you know you can't trust a man with blue eyes?

Lies.  It was all lies.

Ms Moir seems positively shocked and asks 'how did such a godforsaken, blood-spattered, flamboyantly violent, women-hating television series ever get made in the first place?'  That's not all she asks.  'How did Ripper Street – which airs at 9pm – get past the censors, the powers that be, the arbiters of good taste, or indeed anyone at the BBC with a modicum of sense or sensibility?'  And yet she quite happily admits that no-one is expecting a television drama lightly connected with Jack the Ripper to be 'a lovely tea party with cream cakes and kittens'.  She understands and knows that 'in the badlands and murk of 19th-century East London, brutality was commonplace and life was cheap…'

And yet, and yet, 'there is something horribly wrong about Ripper Street; something about its souring atmosphere and the way that violence is rather too lasciviously portrayed against a backdrop of fetishized period-perfect sets that has left many viewers feeling queasy.'

Well, not this viewer and not Henry either.

In the first episode, the body of a female violinist is found bearing all the trademarks of a Jack the Ripper crime.  However, after performing an autopsy, Captain Homer Jackson (Rothenberg) suggests it might be a copycat.  DI Reid (Macfadyen) and his DS, Drake (Flynn) are then drawn into the Victorian underworld in the form of early pornography and the first snuff films.

'There is torture and murder of women, enthusiastically depicted.  Nothing to do with the Ripper mind you.'  Well, yes, Ms Moir.  You have just mentioned that Jack was only 'loosely' connected with the show.  And, it does all happen six months after the last Ripper murder.  Also, if it's a copycat Ripper murder, do you somehow expect the torture and murder of women to be any less horrid and enthusiastic than the real-life Ripper, who in real life savagely slashed throats and ripped open abdomens with jagged wounds, removing the uterus from most of his victims?  The woman found in the beginning of the first episode (please note that we do not see her getting murdered) had her throat quite neatly cut and symbols cut into her face.  There was not a huge amount of blood, because these wounds were made post-mortem.  Everything else we saw, you would see watching one of those televised autopsies, or in CSI even.

Yeaaaaah!

Ah, but Moir goes on, and what caught her eye was the 'convoluted plotline' about the first snuff films (or should we say snuff magic-lanterns):  'This skimpy premise was enough to galvanise some posh bloke dressed up as an Egyptian to have himself filmed as he throttles and kills a young woman for his own sexual gratification.  We see a great deal more of this act than is strictly necessary.'  This same man then shows his second victim the movies before drugging her and doing the same.  'The camera lingering on Rose's bloodied nostrils and bulging eyes as the leather strap around her neck is tightened was one of the creepiest and most unwarranted scenes I can ever recall seeing in a period drama.'

Don't ever watch City of Vice, Jan.  Just don't.  You may be offended by the authentic and historically accurate story of two men creating a police force, 75 years before the Metropolitan Police.  The Times described it as 'an antidote to the current spate of twee costume dramas'.  I saw the first episode when it aired back in 2008.  You think the murder and torture of women in Ripper Street is bad?

But that's by the bye.  The end scene of Rose (Charlene McKenna) being strangled is shocking, but if you weren't shocked by it and made to feel uncomfortable then I would worry about your mental health.  Why, Jan, how do you look when you're being strangled?  An image of peace, clarity, and vegetable rights, no doubt.  And I suppose your blood does not splatter everywhere when you are run through by a policeman’s sabre.

Oh!  Jan Moir of the Daily Mail!  I could go on about the Victorians’ obsession with Egypt (they had successfully occupied the country in 1882) and the sordid underbelly of the Victorian underworld (complete with prostitution – especially in Whitechapel – and child labour).  I suppose you’ve never read My Secret Life by ‘Walter, a gentleman’, but did you know that Queen Victoria herself liked to draw and collect male nude figure drawings?  Victorian erotica survives in private letters archived in museums, and even in a study of women's orgasms.  And if you think that Ripper Street is glorifying the abuse of women for a modern audience, just look up the Contagious Diseases Acts of the 1860s.  If anything, I rather think Ripper Street is playing it down.

Just a typical happy Victorian family.

In the second episode, a 60-year-old toy maker (David Coon) is found beaten to death.  A 14-year-old boy (Giacomo Mancini) is held responsible by the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee.  Reid and Drake are not quite so sure, as the boy doesn't say anything for or against his conviction, and they look into the case further.  They uncover a gambling den run by Carmichael (Joseph Gilgun), one of the most sinister characters put on the screen in years, who employs a vicious child gang to do his dirty work.  All ends well, of course.

Not so for Jan Moir.  'Elsewhere there are buckets of blood – quite literally, in one dripping morgue scene – far too many belt buckles thwacking into pliant flesh for comfort, clubs studded with nails... as Cockney screams pierce the fog.'

Where else would you prefer the blood to go in the autopsy scene, Jan?  All over Jackson as he performs it?  Over Reid's very fine tweed coat?  What you witnessed was a lovely dose of sanitation in the age of cholera.  I’d call it progress.

Belts, clubs and crosses.  Why gloss over the fact that it's children normally wielding them?  Why not go on and criticise the casino scene where children are dealing cards and serving drinks?  One of them cuts the tongue out of a victim.  We never see it, but surely that should be touched upon too if you want to make a thorough go of it.

In every scene that includes seeing the belt used to thrash someone in the face, there are no buckets of blood.  Yes, people get bloodied.  They've been belted in the face, but it wasn't 'buckets'.  I would hardly call it 'blood-splashed relish' as you do.  I find Rudyard Kipling's contemporary description of late-Victorian belt-fighting far more disturbing.

But it was: -- ‘Belts, belts, belts, an' that's one for you!’

An' it was ‘Belts, belts, belts, an' that's done for you!’

O buckle an' tongue

Was the song that we sung

From Harrison's down to the Park!

Finally, consider these three paragraphs from Jan Moir's 'review':

'There is terrible violence meted out to men and children, too, but the focus of the viciousness is always on the knicker-dropping molls and the "tarts".  Tarts get ripped, tarts get mutilated, tarts get their just desserts – and that don't mean no custard topping, guv.'

No 'tarts' are ripped or mutilated in episode two.  One 'tart' is beaten up, but she gives as good as she gets until outnumbered by four men holding her down.  It is ridiculous to argue that the entire show is focussed on viciousness towards the 'tarts'; even the episode’s title, ‘In My Protection’, accurately reflects its central concern, the (all-male) police force’s protection of a (boy) child from both Carmichael’s (all-male) gang and the (all-male) Vigilantes.

'Together, they wear so many plaid coats, tweed suits, natty hats and accessories that they are in danger of looking like menswear models for the Ralph Lauren winter collection.  In contrast, the women are generally naked – or just shuffle about in rags.'

Yes, please, if you don't mind, Mr Lauren.  Go in this direction.

That's more 'rags' than women wear in Aberdeen on a Friday night out in 2013.

Quick, woman!  Put something on!  Oh, you have.

Shuffling around in rags, Ripper Street style.

'I don't think’, Jan concludes, ‘I will be returning to a Ripper Street where crimes are depicted with such blood-splashed relish, and where the women are either silent (like the inspector's troubled wife), viciously beaten, about to be viciously beaten, rancorous, murderesses, abused, mutilated or dead.'

Reid's wife is not silent, despite the fact that she suffered an as-yet undisclosed trauma involving their daughter.  Reid is the one who can't talk about it; his wife goes to the local church and talks about it there.  Just like any other couple today who may have suffered a great loss in their life, they’re in pain, grieving on different timelines.  He's not shutting her up for any sexist reasons.

I've counted one dead woman (who is also the one mutilated – four fewer than the dead men in the series so far, one of whom was also mutilated); two women viciously beaten (one of whom doesn’t fight back, but only because she is drugged); and one lovely orphanage owner who shields her charges from the violence meted out by the men on the other side of the room, and then saves the day with the aforementioned club with spikes.  Oh, and one murderess, albeit a brief cameo one.  They fight with admirable pluck, and like all plucky fighters, sometimes they lose.

And as for ‘rancorous’: wouldn't you have been rancorous back in the Victorian era, Jan, when, even with a female on the throne, you did not have suffrage rights, the right to sue or the right to own property (and lost whatever property you brought into your marriage, even following divorce)?  Even though you were expected to participate in the paid workforce, and have your income completely controlled by your husband?  When the law regarded men as autonomous persons, but legal recognition of women's rights as such would not be fully realised for generations?

Just what do you propose these women do, Jan?  Sit there stroking their lapdogs or their husbands’ majestic side-whiskers, and tossing off a witty one-liner here and there, when a brief lull falls in the men’s discussion of grouse, port, foreign affairs, and the stock exchange?

I’ll bet you can't wait to sit back down to your next period drama more to your taste, like Downton Abbey, The Hour or Mad Men – even though each features an age of inferior women's rights and females dressed up as sex objects.  However, only The Hour is any good as a television drama that takes the viewer seriously, and you might want to skip that one; there's some blood and 'tarts' in the second series.  The other shows just assume you're an idiot.  You'll love them.

I bet you just loved The Paradise.

Why hello, Jan.  We've been expecting you.