Jack the Ripper and Krays Return to Whitechapel: ITV Series Box Sets Available

Ancient crimes can be as fleetingly frightening as a scene from a Hollywood movie. They don't seem real, when the distance of time is between us.

There are no photographs, nor news reels, to make this seem immediate. The artist sketches look like a gallery from a grotesque comic book.

It is alright to pore over these tales, titillating that inner notion of humanity as the hunter. It's neither sadism nor a sign of personal psychopathy. It's history and a study of society. Reduced to little more than entertainment through its lack of relevance to our reality; like a horror film or a ghost story.

Amongst the fascination, there is a feeling of safety. The aspects of the victims, witnesses and police officers alike are foreign. Their clothes belong to another world, thus we are cushioned from it. Moreover, we retain that knowledge that nothing like this could happen now, could it?

What if there had been a police force? What if they'd had access to DNA testing or CCTV? What if there had been databases, comparing notes across boroughs? What if there had been forensic detectives, with all of the training and equipment that we have today? Those criminals of the past would surely have been caught much more quickly.

Or would they?

This is the whole premise of the ITV drama Whitechapel; and it's not just Jack the Ripper returning to stalk 21st century streets.

Rupert Penry-Jones, Phil Davies and Steve Pemberton star in this ITV police drama. Whitechapel is filmed in the same infamous London borough, where the original Jack the Ripper stalked his victims.

DI Joseph Chandler wasn't entirely welcome, when he was fast-tracked into leading Whitechapel's CID unit. No-one's under any illusion. He's in it for the promotion.

Highly educated and well-spoken, Chandler's posh mannerisms didn't quite fit into the gritty, working-class ethos of the rest of the division.

But the rest of the squad, led by gruff DS Ray Miles, had more important things to worry about at that very moment in time. A woman had been horrifically murdered on their streets. In fact, as the case unfolds, it's all looking very much like a repeat of 1888.

With history playing out before their eyes, the police officers are forced to listen to a man who knows a lot about the original crime scenes. Ripperologist Edward Buchan is viewed with disdain by the majority of the police force. He writes books about Jack the Ripper and takes tourists around to the real life locations on a daily basis.

Right now, his 120 year old knowledge is looking very up-to-date. Using a mixture of modern forensics and the history books, the team seek to catch the copy-cat.

The Whitechapel series isn't merely an excuse to use copy-cat crime ad nauseam. That's fun, but it would quickly lose its realism, if that was the case. Not to mention the fact that it would be very bad luck for the borough involved!

When the second series was announced, I think most people groaned a little. The first had been so good, that repeating it could only dilute the concept. No area would attract so many psychotic historians. The fact that they had one was incredible enough.

Ben Court and Christine Ip didn't do that to their viewers. Every story has a different twist and another way to utilize the lessons of the past, in the investigations of the present.

Jack the Ripper wasn't Whitechapel's only world-famous criminal. During the swinging Sixties, the Kray Twins reigned supreme from neighboring Bethnal Green. But their street ran straight through the border and some of their crimes were committed in those pubs.

Styled after the Mafia, Ronnie and Reggie Kray were eventually caught and locked away. They both died behind bars, after each spending over thirty years there. Hence it's a little perturbing for Chandler et al to discover that another set of Kray twins are terrifying local residents into silence.

There are no hidden dimensions here. Jimmy and Johnny are quite open about their gangster activities, safe in the knowledge that nothing will stick long enough to warrant their arrest. But Buchan has access to the original Kray police files. Will he find mistakes in history, that can be prised open now?

Whitechapel has, at its heart, the premise that history is vitally important. 

This might be a crime drama, but the rich seam running through it is that the past is ignored at our peril. Events are never over, when their repercussions are still being felt.

By the third series, the format was extended into six episodes, leading us through three cases. They all interweave old crime files into the here and now. Buchan's archive is as useful as the reports of the bobbies on the beat, though for varying reasons. The cleverness of Whitechapel's writers is in how they contrive to establish these precedents.

The third outing does not focus just on one historical criminal escapade, but on several. As Buchan's expertise grows, he's not even still confined to those notorious events committed in the local area. He's gone global!

Proving that nothing is ever really original, Buchan manages to find clues in his files for just about anything that the CID can throw at him. He's more organized than ever, with sections on his shelves for all manner of murders and all countries too.  When he's not arguing with an historian's zeal, he's cross-referencing America with Japan to bring things right back home to London.

Meanwhile Chandler, Miles and the rest have some of their nastiest crime scenes yet.