Friday late evenings during the summer of 1973 were the time to revisit dark deeds from Victorian London when Softly Softly’s detective duo of Charlie Barlow (latterly departed to star in his own spin-off series) and John Watt were given the unusual task of fronting a unique dramatised documentary investigation into the case of Jack the Ripper.
I don’t know what made me sit up and watch this series – I wasn't a special fan of Softly, Softly – but I did just that, and stuck with it for the full six episodes, catching the last of them in the TV lounge of the Blackpool guest house where we’d gone for our annual summer holiday. Commencing on Friday 13 July at 9.25pm, the programme occupied the ‘post 9.0 news drama’ slot lately vacated by the espionage thriller series Spy Trap. For the record, the evening’s programmes on BBC1 had included Top of the Pops at 6.55, a repeat of Star Trek’s most reviled episode Spock’s Brain at 7.30, and The Blackpool Tower Circus at 8.15. The Radio Times featured the series on the cover for the 7-13 July edition, and a feature inside looked at the case in some detail.
I’m sure I’d already heard about history’s most notorious serial killer, whose name had long since entered the annals of popular folklore, but until now he’d been little more to me than just a name. The series, scripted by Softly... stalwarts Elwyn Jones and John Lloyd, was based on actual witness statements, and stuck closely to the facts so far as they were known at the time, with speculation (usually offered by Watt) kept to a minimum. Seen today, it makes for rather static and slow-paced viewing: the action cuts between scenes of Barlow and Watt assembling the available evidence and coutroom set-ups where various experts and witnesses speak the actual texts of those who gave evidence at the time. There are occasional re-enactments of short scenes, but there’s no gore and no violence depicted on screen, which might have disappointed viewers hopeful of something more dramatic. As an Amazon reviewer puts it, the series is ideal for those with a serious interest in the subject, and was a far fry from the kind of exploitative treatment that often attends the Ripper elsewhere in the mainstream media.
Stagey it may have been, but the series still managed to conjur up a convincingly claustrophobic atmosphere suggestive of old London. The opening titles were mounted in the form of a Victorian playbill, whilst the end credits played out over an antique engraving of the city. Composer Bill Southgate supplied the memorable theme which, with its leering bass clarinet runs, lent a suitably menacing air to the proceedings (Southgate had also arranged the title music for the most recent series of Softly, Softly).
The series certainly left an impression, as for years afterwards I continued to associate long summer evenings with those televisual trips back to Victorian London. Unlike many similar literary endeavours, the series had no new theory to prove, as Jones and Lloyd were at pains to point out in the introduction to the paperback adaptation, although the final episode did hint at the possibility of the Ripper’s having been a member of the aristocracy or even a minor royal, an idea which has been proposed elsewhere by writers on the subject.
Barlow and Watt did it all over again a couple of years later for the 1976 series Second Verdict, in which the detectives coralled the evidence from various historic crimes and unsolved mysteries including the Lindberg kidnapping, the burning of the Reichstag and the Gallic serial killer Henri Désiré Landru. Rather than merely reporting the facts, the detectives considered possible miscarriages of justice and, as the title suggested, often questioned the official verdicts on the crimes under investigation. Once again, Bill Southgate’s sinister theme topped and tailed each episode. Second Verdict also marked the TV swansong for the Barlow and Watt double act, 14 years on from their debut in Z Cars, although Watt would return later the same year in the final series of Softly, Softly, and turned up in the last ever Z Cars two years later.
Somewhat surprisingly, given the BBC’s track record for retaining videotape masters, Jack the Ripper has survived intact – although the series was shown only once in the UK. It spawned a book, The Ripper File, by Jones and Lloyd, published some two years after the series was shown. For anyone with an interest in the case, the book is still a very useful summary of the events of 1888, drawn from the same primary source materials that formed the basis of the series, and free of sensationalist or exploitative content. The text was, uniquely, adapted back into a film, serving as the source for 1979 movie Murder by Decree which saw Sherlock Holmes (Christopher Plummer) investigating the Whitechaper murders.
The series would not be available to view today without the DVD release which appeared in 2019 from the late, lamented Simply Media. Sadly, there was no follow up release of the equally impressive Second Verdict, and with the demise of the only worthwhile DVD labels focused on obscure British television, it’s unlikely we’ll ever get to see it now. The series evidently still exists, judging from the huge number of frame grabs to be found on imdb.
Jack the Ripper was an interesting experiment, bringing fictional detectives to bear on a real life unsolved murder case. Having Barlow and Watt on board probably smoothed the way for viewers who might have felt less inclined to watch a straightforward documentary; and the sober, restrained presentation of the facts and witness statements must have satisfied anyone with a serious interest in the case. Speaking to the Radio Times in 1971, Elwyn Jones said that, in a sense, the writers’ credit on the series was ‘untrue’: ‘All that John Lloyd and I have written are the Barlow and Watt exchanges. All the rest of the words already existed. Besides, I couldn’t write as well as that to save my life.’