Missed the TV moment everyone’s talking about? finds the resuscitated Ripper Street’s grisly take on London at least half-plausible

THE London of (BBC iPlayer) is pungent and ripe, like a cheese shoppe stocked with decomposing hams. There is a body in the water, “a murdered man, washed up on the western docks”, who quickly becomes a corpse on a slab. There is a copper, Inspector Drake ( Jerome Flynn), who speaks proper, like a man running his words through a rusty sieve.

“There is little by which to place him,” says Drake of the floater on the tide, though there is soil on the cadaver’s boots which does not look like river mud, and he is Indian, and there are quite a lot of Bengal Lancers prancing around, one of whom is a well-spoken major, and the mud is from Hyde Park, and there’s some horse filth on his soles, and the dockers aren’t keen on their labours being interrupted for the investigation of the death of a colonial, especially at a time when the authorities are worrying about Muslim patriots with extreme beliefs. “This borough here has a taste for monsters,” says a passing thespian, “for their birthing and nurture.”

Ripper Street is the show that came back from the slab. It was cancelled by the BBC, resuscitated by Amazon, and it is now regurgitated on the Beeb, where it looks grisly and half plausible, which is a start.

The setting is very much back then — the hats are terrific — but with heavy foreshadowing of back now. Quite aside from the East End murders and the fear of Islamism and the Whitechapel graffiti tours, there is a magical horn trumpet called the telephone, and there is an oldfangled microfiche system, a steampowered Google, which means that the peelers have a way of remembering things that happened yesterday, and the day before that, which is helpful.

That, though, is half of the story. The rest is a bit of dramatic jiggery-pokery designed to get Detective Inspector Reid (Matthew MacFadyen) back from the seaside retreat where he is resting up on account of being shot in an earlier series.

His naughty daughter Matilda has been leading the way, taking day trips to spy on prostitutes making strange kinds of love. Meanwhile, in Whitechapel, the telephone is ringing, and a policeman is trying out an early phonetic alphabet in order to assist with the spelling of these peculiar names. “Harry-Apples-FreddieEdward-Edward-Zebra.” It’ll never catch on, that telephone thing.

Working together for the first time since Pulling, Sharon Horgan and Dennis Kelly’s (All 4) is a dinner party from hell, or Strood, depending on your preference. The comedy is located not far from Horgan’s Catastrophe, though comparisons with Abigail’s Party are hard to resist.

Nat (Eva Birthistle) and Gabe (Adeel Akhtar) are the reluctant guests, armed only with a safe word and a bag of civet coffee. It’s an elegantly staged demolition of middle-class manners, framed around an argument between the hosts, Helene (Victoria Hamilton) and Sasha (Tobias Menzies), who are considering a move to Dorset, where the butcher knows their name.

In the grimly stylised thriller (BBC iPlayer), a number of excellent actors are trapped with a stiff in a remote Scottish house. You know it’s remote because the journey there involves a man torturing his family by playing Hank Williams’s Lost Highway. Never a good sign. The cast take turns at getting hysterical but none can match Juliet Stevenson, who is allowed to go the whole Lady Macbeth while staring at an overflowing sink. Whodunnit in this murder mystery weekend? Who filled the closets with skeletons?