So Rupert Penry-Jones waves goodbye to the world of Spooks and swaps it for the staple of British television drama: the detective show.
His first assignment, tonight on ITV1, was Whitechapel. A woman is found butchered in the East End of London, her throat cut, her intestines on display. Sound familiar? It should do. It happened before. In 1888 to be precise, executed, so to speak, by the UK's first and most celebrated serial killer: Jack the Ripper.
ITV's body is found on the 120th anniversary of what was assumed to be the first Ripper murder. Called to the scene is Inspector Joseph Chandlor, a fast-tracked DI, a graduate trainee with friends in high places. He arrives at the scene, fresh from what looked suspiciously like a St James's St gentlemen's club, wearing a dinner suit and bow tie. He bromptly blanches at the first sight of blood and displays all the signs of obsessive compulsive disorder, carefully arranging his Moleskin diary, Mont Blanc pen and BlackBerry on his new desk.
Meanwhile a team of "proper" down-to-earth, get-the-job-done coppers, led by the ever-excellent Phil Davis treat their new leader with disdain, laughing behind the back of jotter-blotting desk jockey.
Sound familiar? It ought to. The lazy writers of Whitechapel have plumped for just about every cop show cliché you can imagine, short of Chandlor putting Verdi in the CD player and sitting back on a leather armchair with a glass of Laphroaig.
It's a waste of Penry-Jones' talent. His is a strange role: uncertain and nervous. And it all looks a bit odd and never really got going.
But, but , it is underpinned by perhaps the most compelling story in the history of British crime: the Jack the Ripper murders. Unsolved and 120 years on, utterly compelling. As the story unfolds, the parallels between 1888 and 2008 become clear, Chandlor helped by a Ripperologist who runs tours of the Ripper sites in the modern East End.
And the Ripper connection just about keeps the show from drowning. If this were any common or garden murder - in the West End, perhaps, or South London - I would have turned off after about 15 minutes, destroyed by the clichés. But the Ripper endures. Can Adam, sorry Chandlor, solve the UK's most famous unsolved crimes?
Episode Two immeasurably better. click here
