Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
Cast: Matthew Macfadyen, Jerome Flynn, Adam Rothenberg, David Wilmot, Clive Russell, Josh O’ Connor, Laura Haddock, Lydia Wilson, Charles Edwards, Daniel Kendrick, Richard Goulding, Alex Cusack
In some respects not much has changed in Whitechapel in 120 years, certainly not where the idea of ghoulish tourism is concerned. Where today the area benefits from the daily Jack the Ripper tours and the sightseers wanting to take on the mantle of roving armchair detective in London’s, even the U.K.’s, more interesting area and immersing themselves into the history of arguably the most notorious murderers to stalk the Earth, it still feels as though it is erring towards the macabre spectacle.
It is a spectacle that dominated the London borough in the days after Jack the Ripper and made the East End a popular hunting ground for the rich and well-heeled in society, for the type who would not step beyond Chelsea or the City to wallow in the pubs and streets surrounding Brick Lane and call it entertainment is to know how the system works, how the aspired and the affluent secretly feel.
When a young woman is murdered, stabbed over and over again in some frenzied act of retribution, alarm bells could have gone off in Whitechapel that the spectre of the Ripper had once more risen and claimed another soul. Yet as The Incontrovertible Truth was at great pains to show in its stifling atmosphere of all the action taking place in the shadows of Leeman Street Police Station, language and its use of were also part of the chain of events that led to the destruction of a young woman as much as any knife.
The spoken word, in some guttural, deniable, harsh and unforgiving and yet able to determine the fate of others, and in the arms of a master such as Inspector Reid, able to change minds but not to prevent further miscarriage is the key to the episode. To be able to manipulate a person’s willing to help in enquiries by the sheer suggestion of differently used words and spoken without a hint of malice is to demonstrate what can be done. It is a theory some would and have speculated how a killer in the East End past was able to move around without suspicion and impunity as he went upon his grizzly trail of slaughter.
The Incontrovertible Truth relishes in its close proximity, the stifling atmosphere of madness and is one of those episodes that gets under the skin of detective work in the late 1800s. A master of an episode told well.
Ian D. Hall