Eclectica

Mostly cogent, most of the time.

Whitechapel

Caught up with ITV’s Whitechapel yesterday courtesy of the ITV version of iPlayer. The technology is pretty poor, really. It relies on a proprietary Microsoft plug in, and they won’t let you download the programme. Also, it has ads in the ad breaks.

Now, this is not necessarily a problem, but the way it’s been implemented means that if the player crashes in the middle of a segment, upon restarting you have to rewatch the immediately preceding ad segment again. And if you’ve got a slightly dodgy internet connection it crashes a lot. I lost count of the times I watched those bloody ads yesterday. Surely there’s a better solution?

Anyway, the programme got a bit of a kicking in the press for ‘disappointing third act’ syndrome, a problem that besets almost any high concept drama like this one. But I think the crits were slightly unfair.

The main problem is that the only ways to catch a serial killer in the real world are profiling, forensics or luck. There are exceptions – Steve Wright in Ipswich, for instance, was known to all his victims – but normally, with no motive other than self gratification, and no relationship between the killer and the victims, it’s intuition and science that lead to an arrest, or a lucky break. You’d be amazed how many real world serial killers are caught by chance.

The problem with portraying this in a drama is that it seems lazy to an audience raised on the strict accumulation of clues approach favoured by the more traditional whodunnit. The usual dramatic solution is to create a detective who makes a stunning intuitive leap at the last minute, and this is exactly what Whitechapel did when Joe had his ‘eureka moment’. This way at least the solution comes from a moment of character rather than pure chance, and an audience will normally go with it if they like the character of the detective.

Admittedly Whitechapel rather clumsily made the capture of the killer depend upon him being the only person in an entire housing estate to open his door at the exact moment the copper was walking past, which is a bit much, but Joe was only there because of his moment of insight, so in essence it was justifiable. And I regularly forgive a whole hell of a lot more from Russell T Davies in Doctor Who.

There were other minor niggles: Mitre Square does not have a convenient underground car park from which the Ripper could have emerged to dump his victim, and even if it did, he could only have known when the coast was clear if he was plugged into the CCTV networks, which was never implied. Also, why did they put that bit in about finding the killer’s computer when it led absolutely nowhere?

But there were two things that raised this above the usual slasher fare.

The first was its treatment of the Ripper himself. The point about the Ripper – and I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently, what with my lunchtime excursions – is that we don’t know his name. Truth be told, we know everything about him except that, in as much as he was a nutter with a knife. That’s it, that’s all you need to know. He was no different to Peter Sutcliffe, Steve Wright, Ian Brady or whoever you care to name. And those people are, once unmasked, entirely mundane, ordinary people who just happen to have a blown fuse. It’s their ordinariness that makes them so scary.

There’s no reason to believe that the Ripper was anything different. He was probably a train driver, or a butcher or a school teacher. His neighbours probably liked him and his day to day behaviour didn’t ring any alarm bells in the people who knew him. Remember, the whole of London was obsessively looking for the Ripper but no-one got so much as a whiff of him. Why? Coz he was nothing special.

Alan Moore’s brilliant epilogue to From Hell, Dance of the Gull Catchers, deals with this and points out that the Ripper has become a blank canvas upon which writers and theorists project whatever they want, from royal conspiracy to alien or time traveller. But solve the real mystery, name the real Ripper, and you rob him of his narrative importance.

Whitechapel, rather brilliantly, understood this. And so the Ripper it gave us was a cipher, a John Doe of contructed identities and disguises – a person literally without an identity. The only important thing about him, the only thing necessary to know about him, is that he exists and is killing people. We’re given nothing else at all.

Again, for the addict of conventional crime fiction this feels like a cheat – why don’t we get the scene where he explains himself? They cry. Why don’t we get a psychological breakdown, and the big reveal of his tortured past?

Because it doesn’t matter. The very power of the Ripper is his anonymity, and Whitechapel very intelligently made that the central feature of its resolution. Bravo.

The second thing that made it work so well was the quality of its characterisation. Joe was a surprisingly original creation. How refreshing to see a copper who wasn’t a disfunctional middle aged maverick. Joe was young, callow, posh, by the book, obsessive compulsive, and entirely out of his depth. And he genuinely grew and changed across the episodes, so the man he was at the end was a million miles away from the annoying martinet of episode one.

The relationship he forged with Miles was very well written and played. The scene in the cafe where Miles finally takes pity on him was deft and affecting, and well played by both leads. Plus, the show found time for character based humour; the awkward moment where we realise that Miles thinks Joe is gay was uneccessary, the kind of thing that ends up on the cutting room floor in the race between killings, but it was telling and funny, humanising the characters even more and showing how far they’ve come in their burgeoning friendship.

Steve Pemberton’s ripperologist, Buchan, was also rather wonderful. His progress from showboating Ripper dramatist, to enthusiastic detective, to suspect and then, finally, broken man, unable to continue his Ripper tours, yelling at the crowd ‘murder isn’t entertainment!’ and trashing his reputation in a last ditch attempt to derail the modern killer, was believable, well written and well performed. The subtle undercurrent of his unspoken love for Joe was also nice, adding an extra layer that lifted the character from well crafted stereotype to fully rounded human being.

So in the end yes, the conclusion was a bit rushed and did rely on intuition and coincidence, but I always expected that because it’s inherent in the very premise. I wasn’t watching for that; I was watching to see what else the writers and cast could do. And what they did within the restrictions of the format, with their smart writing and compassionate characterisation, was sterling stuff, much better than we’ve come to expect from ITV recently.

I’m glad it did so well in the ratings – it finished with over 7 million, which is very strong for ITV these days. Given those numbers it seems a dead cert that we’ll be seeing this team of coppers again, solving another case. They were well sketched and fun to spend time with, and the final scenes screamed ‘give us a series!’

Whether the series can succeed without the banner headline of “Ripper copycat in modern London!” remains to be seen, but as a one-off, Whitechapel was really rather fab and if the writing remains this clever, I see no reason the series can’t do very well indeed.