Gunslingers, marshals, shoot-outs... it's the Wild West in the East End: Christopher Stevens reviews last night's TV
Ripper Street (BBC1) ★★✰✰✰
Pickpockets And Proud (C5) ★✰✰✰✰
History is a nuisance. It’s simply irritating that mobster Al Capone didn’t hail from Solihull or that Wild West gunslinger Wyatt Earp wasn’t a Cockney. America has all the great criminal characters.
Luckily, we’ve got television to put that right for us. Last night the telly assured us that Victorian London was policed by marshals toting six-guns, holding back a tide of opiates flooding the city through organised crime in Chinatown.
Ripper Street (BBC1) echoed the recent cops ’n’ hoodlums show, Peaky Blinders on BBC2, which had us believe gangsters in the Twenties fought pitched battles with machine guns on the streets of Sutton Coldfield, not Chicago.
If all this hokum makes you despair, blame the American cable channels. They have been sweeping the awards with innovative series that have transformed U.S. television into an artform — dazzling actors, mesmerising sets, shattering soundtracks.
'Ripper Street was desperate to emulate Western series Deadwood with its muddy streets, opium haze, painted ladies, Oriental criminals, check waistcoats, florid language and, above all, plaintive menace of the banjo and fiddle always plucking away in the background'
British TV is trying to mimic them. So Peaky Blinders wanted to be Boadwalk Empire, the New York gangland drama starring Steve Buscemi that returned for its fourth series on Sky Atlantic on Saturday.
And Ripper Street was desperate to emulate the short-lived but seminal Western series Deadwood with its muddy streets, opium haze, painted ladies, Oriental criminals, check waistcoats, florid language and, above all, plaintive menace of the banjo and fiddle always plucking away in the background.
Never mind that in historical 1890s London, the pervasive sound was the barrel organ playing music hall songs.
Deadwood, of course, had British actor Ian McShane as its murderous, booze-sodden hero, Al Swearengen. Ripper Street stars a stuffed shirt with a hat on top: the name of the stuffing is Matthew Macfadyen but a shop dummy would look just as comfortable in the role.
From the Dockland street markets hung with red lanterns to the silk-strewn cat-houses, Ripper Street is visually ambitious.
GROANER OF THE NIGHT
Robson Green told his favourite childhood joke in a seaside chippie on Tales From Northumberland (ITV): ‘Bloke goes into a fish shop and asks for cod’n’chips twice. The man behind the counter says: “I heard you the first time.” ’ Boom boom!
But the script was lazily strung together — a fault common to almost all British period drama at the moment.
In Downton Abbey, lady’s maid Anna, played by Joanne Froggatt, was using the jargon of Nineties psychologists to insist she wasn’t ‘a victim . . . that’s not who I am’.
And in Ripper Street, Joseph Mawle’s corrupt copper promised his moll that life was going to be ‘gravy’ — a slang word for ‘easy’ that wasn’t coined until the Seventies. Doesn’t anyone in TV own a dictionary?
The idea that heroin was devised for the opium dens was also wrong. In fact, it began as a cough medicine for TB patients.
These days, tuberculosis is mostly gone and heroin itself is the disease, as Pickpockets And Proud (C5) proved.
Coventry drug addict Rob Nightingale, 37, took the cameras with him as he skulked through the city centre, dipping into bags and lifting purses from shopping baskets.
Amoral, heartless and so steeped in heroin that he could barely form his words, Nightingale admitted he picked targets who couldn’t fight back or chase him — ‘old ladies or vulnerable women with children’.
Pickpockets And Proud features various criminals plying their trade on unsuspecting members of the public, including John, Georgie and Cipriano, from Liverpool
He reckoned he made £100,000 a year, and spent it all on heroin. Half of all thefts in Britain are committed to pay for drugs.
‘I have felt guilty, ‘cos the old lady might just have cashed her pension,’ he said, ‘but as soon as you’ve had your fix, that’s it, the guilt’s gone.’
Meanwhile, the council was paying his £63 weekly rent. As Nightingale broke into a car to steal a handbag that he then dismissed as ‘rubbish’ and dumped in a canal, the only glimmer of justice seemed to be that the Coventry police would at least have plenty of evidence when they charged him.
Then it transpired Nightingale was already due in court, for snatching a purse in a supermarket. He had been caught and handed to security guards by outraged shoppers.
But despite his long criminal record, the magistrates handed him a suspended sentence. He walked free, declaring himself a chastened man who was off to rehab to clean up his life. Who could doubt him?
Who indeed. You’d have to be a magistrate to fall for hokum as blatant as that.
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