It's not often I'll waffle on at length about television on this blog... Torchwood may well have been kindling to my ire, Doctor Who might get a mention once in a while... and there were cases where I started watching a series only to find it too terrible to continue watching or commenting on... But even those are few and far between. So it's only fitting that I give an honourable mention to BBC1's Ripper Street, a new police procedural set in the Whitechapel of 1889, in the times after Jack the Ripper.
There's a core cast of three protagonists and, by the looks of it so far, a villain of the week. So far, so blah, but the protagonists are a motley bunch. Detective Inspector Edmund Reid (Matthew McFadyen playing it inscrutible/tortured/constipated as usual) is the well-spoken and typically uptight vaguely posh copper, with Detective Sergeant Bennet Drake (Jerome Flynn playing it Cockney and cocky) forever at his side... but then there's former Pinkerton (or is he?) Captain Homer Jackson (Adam Rothenberg), the drink-drug-addled forensic genius who seems to do all the actual detective work while the other two mooch about looking moody and occasionally getting into fights.
The pilot episode dealt - oddly enough - with the death of a prostitute. Clearly the work of Jack, said the press (and the Detective formerly in charge of the Ripper case). Clearly not, insisted Reid. I'm not entirely sure where this episode thought it was going, but it did its level best to confirm the commonly-held theory that the driving force behind any innovation in entertainment is pornography. Overall, it seemed rather bitty, as if someone thought the core crime wasn't enough to sustain an hour's worth of television (which it was), so they threw in an underground prizefight fixing 'scandal', possibly by way of an introduction to the villain of the week, a moustachioed toff with a taste for bare-knuckle pugilism and sexual asphyxia (not together, though - there is such a thing as too kinky).
Some of it stretched credulity - a police photographer who, guilt-ridden, tried to burn the Detectives alive? - and it seemed like it could have either made use of another half hour or so to flesh out the story properly, or just cut out the prize-fighting bits so it could focus on the main story - but, surprisingly graphic (for the BBC) sexual deviance aside, it worked pretty well as an introduction.
If I had any gripes about the first episode, they would be that Matthew McFadyen does a very good job of portraying wood at the best of times but, when given a period costume and some unbelievably dense dialogue (in the sense of verbose, but tightly packed, rather than stupid), his clear and careful enunciation makes him come across like an alien, rather than a (police)man of his time. Reid is clearly a clever man, but often seems incapable of connecting any of his clues. Jerome Flynn suits his part admirably, but it's a shame he didn't get much dialogue, generally seeming to be around purely to punch things... and something doesn't quite ring true about Adam Rothenberg's former US Lawman from the very beginning. One of the strangest aspects of the show was the significant looks that passed between Reid and Drake during the fisticuffs, which led me to suspect they'd later end up snogging in an alleyway... but it turned out to be purely for the purposes of signalling.
Episode 2 came across like a combination of Oliver Twist and Assault on Precinct 13, but with some rather heavy handed referencing to the London riots of August 2011. It also went to show that the Beeb doesn't always shy away from showing drug usage by 'the good guys': with Jackson suffering from the mother of all hangovers, Reid whips up a medicinal drink involving cocaine (which works suspiciously quick for an oral solution!). Now, OK, I'll accept that cocaine was more acceptable then than it is now... but why, oh why, did Moffat/Gatiss's Sherlock have to resort to nicotine patches? It's all the more galling when the US series, Elementary, purportedly gives the world a contemporary Sherlock Holmes who's a genuine recovering addict.
Also, perhaps I'm just getting cynical in my old age, but when a TV show presents a seemingly respectable toymaker getting beaten to death by a child, surely I'm not the only one to draw the obvious conclusion? Ripper Street wins points, then, for coming up with a larger puzzle and a more complex solution, but then loses some of them by being perhaps a little too clever about its twists and having a rather clichéd denouement. So much of the story is effectively smokescreen for a much simpler crime, one almost wonders why they went to such trouble about it. Nevertheless, in these days of dumbed-down television, a slightly less dumbed-down series is particularly welcome.
McFadyen is still rather wooden, though his exchange with Amanda Hale, playing Reid's wife Emily, comes across as merely starched instead - Reid seems to be a man keeping his emotions under lock and key. Flynn is still woefully underutilised, barely even getting to punch anyone till the big confrontation at the end, but he does get two key scenes with the murder suspect, both offering hints as to his background, as alluded to in an earlier conversation with his Detective Inspector.
In many ways, Ripper Street seems to want to be one of those US-style 'period' series that bring in subtly anachronistic elements to bridge the gap between then and now. The inclusion of an American character in the mix seems quite cynical - an obvious sign that the BBC intends to flog this show to the States - and his Sherlock Holmes-like ability to discern all sorts of things from the slightest forensic detail means that the audience has to just take it as a given that the man is the best in his field... despite very possibly not being who he purports to be.
In other news, I had a couple of weird fragments-of-dream lately. One simply involved switching off the power to my PC before it had finished shutting down (which is going to happen, sooner or later, because I tend to switch off the monitor while it's shutting down), meaning I was in fear of a warning message - in real life - when I switched on the next morning.
The other was quite a clever puzzle, very much like something out of a videogame. Well, I call it a puzzle... it was more of a serendipitous solution. I was in the shower (not actually mine, more like a communal shower, by the looks of it - dark and grimy granite walls, thin exposed pipework covered in limescale, algae and moss) and noticed that the water wasn't coming out of all the holes in the shower head. Granted, it was encrusted with limescale, but the absence of water was rather too regular for that to be the sole cause. I turned off the water, unscrewed the shower head and opened it up... only to find a large (2", maybe?) coin wedged into the outlet.
It would have been nice to see what that coin was all about, but that was when I woke up...
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