Gentleman's Relish

"Anyways I'm off dahn the whorehouse now to have lovingly shot cunnilingus with a brass..."

Matthew Macfadyen has defended Ripper Street against claims it is too graphic – insisting that most Brits Relish Victorian sex and violence. Nearly 90 viewers have complained since the BBC1 crime series, set in east London in the Jack The Ripper era, started two weeks ago. But former Spooks actor Matthew, who plays detective inspector Edmund Reid, reckons the gritty reality shown on screen is an essential part of the show’s appeal. He told TV Biz: "I think people are fascinated by Victorian attitudes towards sex and society. And back then in the East End there was enormous poverty. Actually, it was the Ripper murders that brought to light the dire poverty in the East End. They showed them up to a greater audience."

He added: "Ripper Street is a very original thing really. The script grabs you because it is bombastic, big and colourful and grimy as well. There’s lots of stuff in there. And being able to go back to seedy Whitechapel is brilliant. The show designer is a supremely talented man and his team have been fantastic. All of the sets are as it was back then. There’s a toymaker’s shop, a pub, an orphanage and an asylum and all kinds of different things, so it’s great." Matthew, who is married to actress Keeley Hawes, also praised the show’s writers for refusing to make his bowler hat-wearing character a cliched cynical TV detective. He said: "My character, Reid, is a very dedicated and forward-thinking policeman. What I find interesting is that there’s nothing jaded about him. I wanted to get away from the classic 'seen it all, done it all' copper and he’s definitely not that. He’s progressive and interested in the innovations of the age. But he has also got quite a lot of anger and a fairly dark past. He has made a — terrible mistake and that haunts him. So there’s a lot to play with."


The drama, on Sunday nights at 9pm, sees Reid investigating crime in Whitechapel with the help of American surgeon captain Jack Homer Jackson (Adam Rothenberg) and detective sergeant Bennet Drake (Jerome Flynn). Writing in the Mail, Jan Moir led the charge by calling thr drama an "anti-women orgy of gore". Over Christmas, she noted, the new series had been trailed extensively by the BBC and it looked terrific; 50 shades of sepia suffused with gaslight, rattling carriages and footpads creeping along dripping alleyways. Yet after two unspeakably gory episodes, what she was realy left thinking was more along the lines of this: how did such a godforsaken, blood-spattered, flamboyantly violent, women-hating television series ever get made in the first place? 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? asks Moir.

No one expects a television drama which is even loosely connected — as this one seems to be — to the activities of one of the most infamous murderers in British criminal history to be a lovely tea party of cream cakes and kittens. In the badlands and murk of 19th-century East London, brutality was commonplace and life was cheap — we all know and understand that. Yet, thinks Moir, 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 fetishised period-perfect sets that has left many viewers feeling queasy. There is the torture and murder of women, enthusiastically depicted. Nothing to do with the Ripper, mind you.

In the first episode there was a convoluted plotline about the first snuff movies ever made. 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, argues Moir. Then King Tut-tut makes another girl called Rose watch the film before chaining her up and doing the same to her. 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 she can ever recall seeing in a period drama. Then she is sprayed with his blood as he is killed by a policeman bursting in to save her. It would be laughable if it wasn’t quite so nasty. ‘Ahh, the grotesque passion to break her neck,’ says our Inspector Reid afterwards, explaining the fake pharaoh’s motivation, just in case anyone was still in the dark.

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, crosses cut into a woman’s eyeballs as Cockney screams pierce the fog. 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’. thinks Moir. Tarts get ripped, tarts get mutilated, tarts get their just deserts — and that don’t mean no custard topping, guv.

How did we get here? Inspector Reid presides over an East London still reeling after the Ripper murders, and he is tortured by the fact that he has been unable to catch him. At his side is Sergeant Bennet Drake (Jerome Flynn), who now has a fabulous face, like an Irish Toby Jug that’s been put through a boil wash. He’s gruff and tough. He has to go undercover as a bare-knuckle fighter, which is hardly a stretch. He picks a tooth out of his fist as if it was a peanut; he is Barney Rubble to Matthew’s Fred Flintstone. 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.

There is another principal character, a former U.S. Army doctor shoehorned into the plot to appease the American market. Captain Homer Jackson (Adam Rothenberg) lives with a bitter madam called Long Susan (MyAnna Buring) in a brothel that looks like a country house hotel. However, the captain is a whizz at the forensics racket, so that’s bleedin’ ’andy. Reid is eager to co-opt him into the Ripper squad, but Homer is not so keen. Not only does he call police headquarters ‘the cop shop’, he says he would rather be giving pedicures and selling stuff than hunting killers. ‘Toenails and snake oil mean bread and whisky,’ he says; another line of dialogue that trips off the tongue like molten humbug, snarks Moir.

Naturally, the sarge doesn’t like this Yankee upstart one bit and signals his disapproval of the captain’s louche lifestyle at every opportunity. When Jackson turns up late in episode two, he asks him: "Where have you been? Hanging off a tart’s tit?" Yes, he is meant to be coarse — but does it have to be quite so crude, or insulting to women? she asks. Anyway, the captain’s got some insights into a porn industry that hasn’t started yet. "The act itself, that is the future of smut," he says. Meanwhile Matthew still looks worried and sometimes talks loud and then sometimes talks low, as if he was delivering his lines from the stage of Wilton’s Music Hall. His bowler hat practically oscillates with angst. His eyes are pools of anxiety. Yes, inspector, there are aspects of this series that are arresting and could be quite fun. Yet Moir doesn’t think she 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. Tarts or not tarts, it’s all too much for her.

In a similar vein, as a "woman brimming with ovaries, tubing, hormones, tips of where to get a good pedicure and how to make a lemon meringue pie and half a mind always on trying to avoid being a crime statistic", the very idea of Ripper Street was already a slight televisual turn off for the Independent's Grace Dent. When she is made Director General, she declares, she will look at the upcoming spaffing-money-on-projects list and say loudly: "Jesus Christ, do we have to do Jack the Ripper again?. Will someone get their arse down the British Library and find something macabre and titillating in period costume that I've not seen 129 times already?"

This isn't to say that she thinks Ripper Street is awful. Not if you're in the mood for Matthew Macfadyen as Detective Inspector Edmund Reid and many other blokes like Jerome Flynn and Adam Rothenberg, clad in the sort of Victorian costumes one may hire on Blackpool beach nowadays for a comedy sepia photo session, saying things a bit like: "Annuver tart's been ripped guv! 'Er womb's been left in ribbons and her labia is scattered across two parishes. Ooh it's a terrible do and make no mistakin'! Turns me stomach… Anyways I'm off dahn the whorehouse now to have lovingly shot cunnilingus with a brass." Meanwhile tiny coquettish female actresses dressed in modern-day Victoria's Secret empowering burlesque garb lie on clean, white linen saying things like: "Ooh sir! Being a whore is proper good fun, this oral sex you're giving me is well emancipating! Now be a love and don't cut off my clitoris as a keepsake when you go, 'cos that Jack the Ripper tyke is spoiling all our prossy fun these days! Well, if this sounds like televisual balm to you, reasons Dent, then you'll adore Ripper Street.

It's just that Dent spends a good deal of her womanly life avoiding tales of this genre, having just passed through the cheerful season of widespread drunken domestic violence and lists of top tips for party ladies on how to get home safely, and those charming minicab ads showing a victim being enthusiastically raped behind an NCP. Centuries may shift and fashions may change, yet raping and murdering women has really never been as popular. She fought through episode one of Ripper Street trying to float above the chat – always all-male scenes – about sperm deposits, ripped-out Fallopian tubes – thinking: "Who enjoys this? Who is this really for?"

Of course, the human conscience is messy and contradictory, and Dent admits to not having this dilemma with the sex and guts of Sky Atlantic's Game of Thrones. That said, she feels it unlikely in real life she wil inherit dragon eggs, marry a Stallion king and forge war on five kingdoms, which aids her cheerfully to overlook some of her favourite show's dubious sexual messages. In the opening of season one of Game of Thrones, Daenerys is violently raped by her new husband, yet, after a softly lit tryst, decides to lighten up about sex and learn some new positions to tempt her attacker instead. Now, did she – accompanied by many other women with banners and a stuck-record approach to berating the patriarchy – converge upon Sky Atlantic to complain? No. Perhaps it's about balance, so when a show is littered with female warriors, detectives or war-lords, she finds the woman-garrotting slightly more palatable.