Barlow and Watt investigate Jack the Ripper

Last night I watched the film Murder by Decree on Talking Pictures TV. I've watched it several times because the cast and premise (Sherlock Holmes tracking down Jack the Ripper) are so appealing, and because I always forget how disappointing it is.

But Holmes was the not first fictional detective to investigate the Ripper murders. In 1973 the BBC screened a series in which the nation's most celebrated television detectives Charlie Barlow and John Watt, played by Stratford Johns and Frank Windsor.

It was this series that introduced the public to the theory that the Ripper had been the eldest son of the future Edward VII, Prince Albert Victor. Stephen Knight did not publish his book Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution until 1976.

The 1973 television series avoided turning these terrible murders into a parlour game – Martin Crookall describes its approach well:

The format is simple, level-headed and unmelodramatic. On one level, Barlow and Watt move around a contemporary investigation room, surrounded by books, copies of newspapers, such documentary evidence as there is, and reconstruct the five canonical murders in chronological order. 

They don’t dramatise things, they talk like senior Detectives sifting evidence, looking for similarities and anomalies, testing the weight of the evidence against their professional experience, building up a picture of the time, the place, the people and the events, as fairly and neutrally as they can. Naturally, they talk as the characters they are playing, indulging in a never belaboured degree of the banter and cynicism of the veterans they are. 

Interspersed with this is the reconstruction. Intelligently, and in keeping with the series’ aim to be as factual and complete as possible, these eschew any reconstruction of the killings themselves and lapse into drama only once, showing fourth victim Catherine Eddowes being released from police cells after sobering up, only to be murdered within thirty minutes. She’s the only one of the five victims to actually be depicted in persona.

I'm writing this post because the whole series has reappeared on YouTube – it has a history of coming and going there.

The clip I have chosen above comes from the sixth and final episode. In it Joseph Gorman sets out the meat of the theory and claims that he is the illegitimate son of Walter Sickert. I don't believe a word of it, and Wikipedia says he later admitted his story was a fiction, but it doesn't give a source for this. Elwyn Jones, one of the writers of this series, was introduced to him when he told one of his police contacts that he was doing a series on Jack the Ripper.

Finally, a moan and then my Trivial Fact of the Day.

The moan is that when the Rest is History tackled the Ripper story, it said that Barlow and Watt were still in Z-Cars in 1973. In fact, they had left the show as long ago as 1965 to appear in Softly, Softly and then Softly, Softly: Task Force. By 1973 Barlow had a series of his own, Barlow at Large.

And my Trivial Fact of the Day? It's that Jack Warner's daughter in the often misremembered Dixon of Dock Green was first played by Billie Whitelaw.