The Brutal Truth

Ripper Street, Line of Duty and Good Cop may pile on the gore, but we shouldn't be shocked – it's just a return to gruesome form for British TV, notes the Guardian's Ben Dowell. New BBC1 drama Ripper Street, which began on Sunday evening boldly reimagines late 1880's Whitechapel as a Wild West outlaw town coping with the aftermath of the Ripper slayings. Inspector Edmund Reid (Matthew Macfadyen) and his two mates (Jerome Flynn and Adam Rothenberg) are like the sheriff and two goodies combating a gruesome world where beatings, sexual attacks and murder come at the viewer suddenly and unexpectedly. Most of the female characters seemed to be either prostitutes or mutilated cadavers and, if that's not enough, last night's first episode ended with the apprehension of a killer making what was essentially a Victorian snuff movie.

Shocking stuff, especially for BBC1, you may think. And it may even be a sign of an ever more violent TV drama landscape in which earlier this month Ofcom took the BBC to task for the use of a 13-year-old actor in a torture scene in BBC2 drama Line of Duty ("Give it, give it, now hold his hand out and give me that fucking finger"). And did you see the brutal killing of Tom Hopper's character in the opening episode of Good Cop? "I found it hard going", admits Dowell. What are we to make of August's Ofcom research, gleefully reported in the Mail, that a third of TV viewers believe our screens have too much violence and swearing? Is British TV drama really getting more brutal and vicious? Or has it been ever thus? Dowell believes the latter – and here's why.


Imports are one thing, but in terms of homegrown drama, you could argue that perhaps the most horrific moment occurred a full 10 years ago when a new BBC1 spy drama exploded into life with the dunking of a woman's head in a fryer full of sizzling chip fat. That tasty scene from the first series of Spooks (it was Lisa Faulkner's administrative officer Helen Flynn, if you recall, who met this unpleasant end) has gone down in legend. Despite thousands of complaints and regulatory intervention, it announced a show that went on to be one of the most successful drama series in BBC history. Earlier this year, son of Spooks, the Melissa George private espionage drama series Hunted, featured a relentless bout of shootings, fights and other elaborate killings (including a murder by syringe in the eyeball). But somehow, compared with the deep fat fryer, it all seemed a bit tame and cartoon-like. And the series will not be returning to BBC1.

Other broadcasters do their bit too – C4's The Fear had its near-the-knuckle moments but ITV's bloodiest heyday has long gone. In truth, it has never really served up stronger meat than Wire in the Blood, which finished more than five years ago or Taggart, which started in 1983. Home-produced TV from the 1980s and 1990s was if anything, more violent than what we have now.

The BBC's controller of drama commissioning, Ben Stephenson, says that he has not been "shocked in a bad way" by anything he has seen on TV. Even the death of Tom Hopper's character was carefully thought out and edited he says – the aim was to maximise the emotional impact, and not simply shock for its own sake. "I think that conflict and correcting life's wrongs are at the heart of drama," he says. "Different dramas require different levels of violence." He says that the BBC never discusses how violent a drama should be. "It is always about the integrity of the storytelling and whether what is in the script underscores the emotion."

Indeed, of BBC1's five returning series from 2012 – The Paradise, Call the Midwife, Last Tango in Halifax, The Syndicate and Prisoners Wives – all are pretty mild and soft (and there's not a cop show in sight). So while it would be tempting to believe that our capacity to tolerate gory or grisly scenes has deepened over time, this just doesn't seem to be the case.

None of the top 10 most complained about programmes to Ofcom in 2012 were dramas (Big Brother was No 1). And when people do complain about dramatic violence it is quite often not when humans are on the receiving end. The most complained about moment in BBC2 thriller The Shadow Line (which had its moments) was the submersion of a cat in a barrel of water. In South Riding, the 2011 period drama, the CGI recreation of a horse falling off a cliff also drew one of the biggest complaint logs of the year. Perhaps the most shocking thing about our TV drama is what actually seems to shock people.