TV Crime Log: Ripper, Escape, Dracula

I’ll keep this quick because I’m busy picking my garden furniture out of the trees. Another week brings another stampede of new crime thriller televisual product. Here are three dramas that may tickle your fancy.

Moved from its original, more genteel home of Sunday night, the second series of Ripper Street starts tonight on BBC1 at 9pm.

Gawd bless ya, guvnor, here’s the blurb:

Jack The Ripper may be fading into memory now, but East London has found no peace; H Division’s beat is more chaotic and lawless than ever.

So when a sergeant from Limehouse’s neighbouring K Division is found, hurled from a Whitechapel tenement window on to the iron railings below, Reid is quick to act. If the police are to be so publicly assaulted on his streets, what hope for law-abiding civilian life?

Investigations into the man’s activities lead them to the newly emergent Chinatown of the Limehouse dockside; and from there into the orbit of K-Division’s Inspector Jedediah Shine.

Shine’s conviction is that his sergeant has fallen victim to a Triad turf-war in this new market, but Jackson discovers evidence of a newly synthesised and devastatingly powerful opiate that leads Reid to different conclusions. And a dread fear that a new kind of hell is to be released on to his streets.

The first series of Ripper Street did well, but - with its early parade of slaughtered prostitutes - polarised opinion. Writer Richard Warlow has said he was never interested in Jack The Ripper, and to be fair, the series quickly dropped the subject and moved on to more interesting themes. In this second series, we’re promised investigations featuring eugenics, freakshows – featuring an appearance by The Elephant Man – cults and the rise of opium.

So that’s Monday night at 9pm. Or tonight, for those of you whose short-term memories have been blown away in the high winds.

The hardest working man in showbusiness, David Tennant, appears in The Escape Artist as one of those highly-talented lawyers whose brilliance in in winning cases comes back to bite him on the bottom.

The court will be upstanding for the blurb:

Will Burton, a talented junior barrister of peerless intellect and winning charm, specialises in spiriting people out of tight legal corners, hence his nickname - The Escape Artist.

Much to the aggravation of his courtroom rival, Maggie Gardner, Will is in high demand, as he has never lost a case.

But when Will’s talents acquit Liam Foyle, who is standing trial for an horrific and high-profile murder, that courtroom brilliance comes back to bite him. Foyle walks free, but he is a serial killer. It’s only a matter of time until he finds his next victim.

And, sure enough, he kills again.

The Escape Artist in on Tuesday - or as I prefer to call it, tomorrow. BBC1 at 9pm.

If you want some Tepes, peeps, we should just a have a quick word about the return of our old friend Dracula, back again for a new show on Sky Living. The Count still has an eye for the ladies, is still following a diet heavy in iron and still has a chip on his shoulder about stuff that happened centuries before – let it go, Vlad, just let it go.

In the first of this 10-episode series, he arrives in London posing as an American entrepreneur who wants to bring modern science to Victorian society, only to fall hopelessly in love with a woman who seem to be a reincarnation of his dead wife. I hate it when that happens.

Jonathan Rhys Meyers, who does a nice line in glowering, is Vlad - there he is to the left, hard at work - and all the gang is featured, such as Mina Murray, jonathan Harker, Renstein and that old spoilsport Van Helsing.

Sky Living – shouldn’t it be called Sky Undead? – shows the first episode on Friday night at 9pm. Yes, you’re correct, that’s Halloween. What a crazy coincidence.