Not even Emilia Fox could crack this Ripper quagmire
Emilia Fox’s forehead creased into a familiar corrugation of professional concern as she scrutinised a series of crepuscular crime scenes. She wore the same frown in a couple of hi-tech labs which boasted cutting-edge crimesolving technology but no decent overhead lighting.
Channel hoppers would be forgiven for thinking they’d stumbled onto a new episode of Silent Witness (now the world’s longest-running television crime drama) in which Fox plays a Home Office pathologist granted cosily implausible dramatic licence to solve the murder of every socially relevant corpse wheeled beneath her scalpel.
But no, this was Jack the Ripper: the Case Reopened, a BBC One documentary in which Fox was granted dramatic licence to question some modern crime experts and offer the “definitive” verdict on the world’s most notorious cold case: that of “Jack the Ripper”, a shadowy figured suspected of murdering at least five women between August and November, 1888.
This year has seen a welcome shift in the way we remember the wellworn facts and theories. In February, historian Hallie Rubenhold published Five Women, which set out to challenge the idea of “an invincible, male killer… in his top hat and cape, wielding his
blood-drenched knife” and “honour his genius and laugh at the murder of women”. March saw the premiere of Iain Bell and Emma Jenkins’ opera about The Women of Whitechapel.
So the BBC’S focus on the killer felt outdated. The documentary’s only USP was its access to modern crimesolving technology. We marvelled at a three-dimensional “digital autopsy” table, got a crash course in “geoprofiling” and admired Scotland Yard’s clever crime-linking computer programme: Holmes.
Fox and co eliminated some popular suspects, including a relative of Queen Victoria and the painter Walter Sickert. The programme then trudged, like the guided walks of London’s tourist trail, to the most widely accepted conclusion that the killer was probably a Polish immigrant called Aaron Kosminski.
Kosminski was committed to an asylum in 1890 after attacking his sister. This also explained why the killings stopped so abruptly. But it was ungenerous of the BBC not to give any credit to Russell Edwards, author of the Kominski-fingering The Naming of Jack the Ripper (2014). Edwards backed up his theory by commissioning the Dna-testing of a shawl believed to belong to the Ripper’s final victim.
Ironically – after an hour of gloomy interiors and dusky cab rides – Fox told us she had “shed new light” on the murders. Can TV close this case now, please? Helen Brown
Solid foundations, unimpeachable structure, but few frills: Grand Designs has been going for 20 years. Now Channel 4 is ringing in the show’s third decade with Grand
Designs: the Street, in which 10 houses are built by their owners on land bought from the Cherwell District Council, near Bicester. Kevin Mccloud, unaffected by the ravages either of time or of witnessing 191 episodes of folly after catastrophe, was once again on hand, dispensing wry observations like pebbledash.
The first two houses were to be taken on by three senior citizens: married couple Terry and Olwyn, and Lynn, a novice determined to manage the project and get as hands-on as possible. Good neighbours and friends before the move, they rapidly slipped into being mean about each other as nicely as possible. Passive aggression abounded, Lynn over promises she felt Terry, with his previous construction experience, had made to help her out, Terry over Lynn overestimating said promises. “It’s entirely my fault,” he smiled without any conviction.
Budgets were blown, schedules slipped and cracks, both literal and metaphorical, appeared. Yet it was impossible not to admire the ambition and graft on both sides. Terry and Olwyn’s home was splendid, and, described by Mccloud as “unfettered by trendy ideas”.
And Lynn? “It’s quite amazing to even be here,” she marvelled from inside the house, complete with “roundel-style” walk-in shower, before admitting she had sunk her savings and pension pot into salvaging the project. Mccloud, naturally, was too polite to do more than raise a quizzical eyebrow, instead calling her achievement “inspirational”. I would suggest “cautionary”. Two decades feel both inevitable and welcome. Whether it’s Grand Designs: Marlow or Grand Designs: Mars, it will always boil down to the collateral damage when architectural innovation and human hubris collide. Gabriel Tate
Jack the Ripper: the Case Reopened
Grand Designs: The Street ★★★★