New take on Yorkshire Ripper
This superb drama about the botched UK police hunt for Peter Sutcliffe focuses on the serial killer’s victims and their families.
We never seem to tire of TV shows about serial killers, those evil magicians catering to a kind of seemingly inherently morbid fascination with death and the gothic.
As the novelist Denise Mina suggested, they are fairly new boogie men, though we talk about them as if they’ve always been lurking in dark, dank places. “It’s a social construction, like witches, they aren’t spontaneously occurring geniuses,” she wrote. “Time and again cases come up that don’t fit the model: women don’t fit, Mexican cartel killings don’t fit, many white male multiple killers don’t fit the serial killer model.”
But we devour their stories nonetheless, the lives of these killers sensationalised, glorified and even, in some cases, humanised.
This is not the case in The Long Shadow, a new British drama series that follows the desperate five-year hunt for serial killer Peter Sutcliffe, who between 1975 and 1980 terrorised the people of Yorkshire during a killing spree that left 13 women dead and countless more lives devastated by grief and suffering.
The series centres on one of the largest and most expensive manhunts in British history, with West Yorkshire Police criticised for their failure to catch Sutcliffe, despite having interviewed him nine times during their long investigation.
The Long Shadow, unlike so many serial-killer TV series, perceptively and empathetically focuses on the victims who crossed his path and the officers at the heart of the police investigation. They are at the centre of this intense and superbly produced drama, rather than the killer.
This series comes from the accomplished writer George Kay, who not only created the brilliant French thriller Lupin and co-created the impressive Netflix procedural series Criminal, but most recently, with Jim Field Smith, was responsible for the Idris Elba thriller Hijack.
Kay also wrote last year’s Litvinenko, another true crime series, a four-part adaptation of the real-life poisoning of former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko in 2006. His death sparked one of the most complex and dangerous investigations in the history of London’s Metropolitan Police.
Kay certainly knows his way around the police procedural, both based on real-life investigations and slick fictional ones.
The Long Shadow’s director is the equally accomplished Lewis Arnold, who has helmed hit TV dramas such as Misfits, Des, Time and Broadchurch. Arnold is a director of impeccable taste who appreciates that film is a universe where chance is never an excuse for anything, that every moment is the result of very particular decisions.
Award-winning actor Toby Jones plays Detective Chief Superintendent Dennis Hoban, who initially led the inquiry, with David Morrissey taking the role of another DCS, George Oldfield, who was pompously old school, and the always welcome Lee Ingleby is DCS Jim Hobson, Hoban’s offsider, a larrikin with flash suits and coiffed hair.
The seven-part series is based on Michael Bilton’s well-received Wicked Beyond Belief: The Hunt For The Yorkshire Ripper, published in 2003. It’s a study not so much of the killer himself, described in the preface as a “sick and perverted murderer” but an investigation, as a Guardian review described it, into the misplaced paperwork, lack of liaison, lack of resources, bitter rivalry between different police forces, the intransigence and dim-wittedness of those at the top. This book, wrote critic Blake Morrison, “is like a play with no protagonist. But as a study of a bungled police investigation, it is devastating”.
The Long Shadow also follows the police’s handling of the long-running case, which – until Bilton’s revelatory investigation opened its dark secrets and persuaded its key people to talk after years of silence – allowed Sutcliffe to kill again and again.
But the show is more particularly about those whose lives were affected by his awful crimes: his victims and their families. Sutcliffe hardly appears in the series and there are no grisly re-enactments of his atrocities so common to these fictionalised true crime shows, which are now such a proliferating genre in the new world of streamed TV.
It’s a series that looks at how, of all the consequences of Sutcliffe’s crimes, the anguish of relatives of the murder victims stands alone. The trauma of bereavement is no doubt made even worse by the suddenness of the loss, and the knowledge of the circumstances in which it occurred. For many bereaved families, the immediate aftermath of a death is only the beginning.
Kay says he began developing the series about four years ago, determined to maintain the perspective of the story with the people left dealing with the effects of Sutcliffe’s actions.
“I’d had this observation about police dramas, including stuff I’d written, where at the end of a scene with the police, when they leave the room, the camera follows,” he told Drama Quarterly.
“I wanted the camera to stay and find out what happened next to those people, and even if they’d survived an attack by Peter Sutcliffe, what that did to their lives and how that ruined their lives and those of the people they loved. It felt like there were so many interesting stories outside of the crime itself.”
As he says, characters exist after and before the “fulcrum moment” that changes their lives: “I hope that continues to be the emphasis, but it doesn’t mean we can’t tell the police story too.”
Kay says he was inspired to write the series after reading about the death of Sonia McCann, 39-year-old daughter of Sutcliffe’s first victim, Wilma. On December 19, 2007, police found her dead at her home. After battling alcohol addiction in a rehabilitation centre, Sonia had taken her own life, having “lost hold of the fragile grip I had on my life’’.
She was just seven when her mum was killed, and happiness eluded her afterwards.
Sonia, who used her mother’s maiden name Newlands, told a documentary about her continuing grief in 2005: “I think most people remember the number 13 – the number of women Peter Sutcliffe killed.
“But what about the children? There’s 25 of them and no one remembers them.”
Kay says: “This is what our show, The Long Shadow, encapsulates. For in my view, 32 years after he first killed, Sonia became Peter Sutcliffe’s final victim.”
He also says that the show’s title was changed during pre-production after he and his colleagues learned during their research of the terrible pain the families of Sutcliffe’s victims still suffered. “We started by calling it The Yorkshire Ripper when we announced it,” he says.
“But we learned over time that the name people use to describe Peter Sutcliffe – which obviously began before anyone knew his real name, but then continued after his identity was revealed – was disrespectful in many ways.” It’s a moniker he says that’s especially dreadful “because it creates a sort of dark brand around a man who doesn’t deserve that sort of attention’’.
The first episode begins with a vigorous montage of news events in the UK in 1975. There is talk of the Beatles getting back together, the energy crisis is worsening, there are demonstrations for human rights, and the British people are voting to remain a member of the European Community.
Wilma McCann (Gemma Laurie) sneaks out of her house in the dark, heading off for a drink, leaving her four children asleep. In the morning, discovering her absence, they wait for a bus, but their mother never arrives. She’s later found in nearby Prince Philip playing fields.
An investigation begins, supervised by the resolute DSC Dennis Hoban, played with his usual brilliance by Jones. He’s a stern, decent copper, constantly urged to take a few minutes off and relax by his colleagues, his wife always asking him “to leave it” when the phone rings at home.
As he surveys the crime scene, he seems to think there is something particularly unusual about what has happened. When Wilma is written off by some police as merely a prostitute, Hoban turns on them.
“Nobody, whoever they are, deserves to die like Wilma did last night,” he fumes.
As the investigation gets under way with grid searches of the crime scene and door-to-door inquiries, we start to follow the Jackson family, living in suburban Leeds. Sydney (an excellent Daniel Mays) can no longer provide for his family, and is ashamed and broken.
His wife, 42-year-old Emily (a superb performance from Katherine Kelly), is sick of it all – the lack of money, the shame of poverty, the embarrassment, and is furious with her feckless husband. So she decides to sell her body to enable the survival of her family. The cliffhanger is truly terrifying. The first episode seamlessly intercuts between the stories of the beginning investigation, its misogyny and the often rancid police politics, and the story of the brave Emily Jackson.
Arnold’s direction is simply impeccable, highly cinematic in the sense that you are aware of a deliberate hand guiding the visuals, always in touch with Jay’s taut, elided dialogue.
The Long Shadow is streaming on Stan.
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