Dark times lie ahead for Ripper Street fans

AUTUMN is here, the nights are drawing in and we begin that inexecrable march towards the chaotic enforced cheer of Christmas.

Dark when you get up to go to work, dark when you leave work to go back home. Most of us don’t even get to see what our houses look like until Saturday morning rolls reluctantly around.

So now, more than ever, we need TV that can lift our spirits and warm the cockles of our hearts.

And, for that reason, I both celebrate and bemoan the imminent departure from our screens of RIPPER STREET (BBC2), the soon-to-end fifth season of which has had my cockles resemble more a bowl of cold jellied eels spilled from the hand of a freshly disembowelled Victorian prostitute.

With its grubby, gritty depictions of the vicious vicissitudes of 19th-century London (like a Center Parcs for serial killers, apparently), the period police procedural hit the gore-splattered ground running way back in 2012 and hasn’t stopped since.

Set amidst a dimly-lit rat’s maze of cobblestoned copulation and carnage, populated almost exclusively by sociopathic toffs, buxom tarts with a heart (which, if they were lucky, remained inside their rib cage) and muttonchopped, cauliflowereared bruisers wot talk like that, Ripper Street never pulled its punches.

But this is a show that’s grown to be so much more than the sum of its shocking parts.

The characters, from Matthew Macfadyen’s buttoned down DI Reid and Flynn’s aforementioned ex-military man to Adam Rothenburg’s wisecracking US medic, have all grown from initial ricketts-ridden, “gor blimey” caricatures to become fully-rounded, if flawed, heroes we all want to root for.

Rothenberg, in particular, has evolved into a real fan favourite, his powers of deduction proving to be on a level of a Sherlock Holmes-type prescience.

And last week he was at it again – with just a few random strands of animal hair found in a back alley he realised that the so-called Whitechapel Golem terrorising local folk was Nathianel, the near mute ward of David Threlfall’s shifty dockyard owner.

He can forget picking up those brownie points back at station, however, given that his own nefarious personal life was finally coming to light.

It seems conspiring to pervert the course of justice by faking your murdering wife’s public execution, ensconcing her with known felons and then robbing Customs House before planning to run away together is a little bit too rum, even for Ripper Street’s morally blurred world.

Long may it fester.

THERE were yet more serial killers when THE FALL (BBC2) returned last week – although Jamie Dornan’s seriously disturbed but oh-so-dishy sadist spent most of the episode comatose and bleeding in hospital.

Indeed, the whole thing played out more like a Northern Irish verison of Casualty, with buckets of blood but little suspense.

Ironic then that, by the time Dornan started to come round at the end, most of us at home were dropping off to sleep. Homer Jackson makes another startling breakthrough