A tour? Not so fast

In 1957, the New Yorker cartoonist Leonard Dove drew two American tourists by their bus in an Italian piazza with one scrutinising her itinerary and saying: “But if it’s Tuesday, it has to be Siena.” It is, however, hard for satire to keep up with reality, and now we learn that there is a Jack the Ripper tour in which the guide and followers run from murder-spot to murder-spot through dark alleys. The motive seems to be not so much getting more rippees per hour into your tour as combining healthful exercise with ghoulish curiosity. The prospect of arriving panting at the location of a gruesome killing might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but once the principle of a Ripper tour is admitted, the sky’s the limit: unicycle Ripper tours, Gin’n’ripper tours, cosplay Ripper tours. The Ripper concept will run and run.