The Stage

Whitechapel: Learning from our ghastly past

Published Thursday 26 January 2012 at 13:00 by Matthew Hemley

As ITV crime drama Whitechapel’s third series is about to hit our screens, Matthew Hemley talks to the show’s writers and one of its stars about why the show strikes such a chord with viewers

Horror movie meets cop show. That is how actor Phil Davis describes the ITV series Whitechapel in which he stars - and it’s a fitting description.

The first series dealt with gruesome murders of a Jack the Ripper copycat killer, while the second revolved around the crimes committed by the notorious Kray twins. In the third, writers Caroline Ip and Ben Court once again delve into the vaults of history’s most disturbing crimes to bring viewers a series that dares to go where some other shows might not - with the drama featuring severed limbs, masked killers and plenty of blood. It’s not for the faint of heart or easily scared.

As the show’s executive producer Sally Woodward Gentle admits: “We have upped the fear factor for the third series. I don’t think there is anything that is genuinely scary on television - something you can turn out the lights to and get excited about.”

Meeting Ip and Court, then, you half expect the writers of the series to have something in their personalities that reflect the morbidity of the crimes they write about, and are so obviously fascinated by. Maybe a flicker in the eye that hints at something dark bubbling away underneath. The truth, in fact, could not be more different. Ip and Court are a quiet, friendly pair who keep themselves tucked away during ITV’s press screening of the new series, happy instead to let the actors and producers have the attention. Ask them outright though, and they do admit to being very interested in murder and why such crimes are committed.

“Although it’s very hard to say that without sounding weird, isn’t it?,” Ip adds, laughing.

In fact, it’s not so weird at all. After all, shows like Whitechapel and other films based on real crimes would not attract the audiences they do if people weren’t so fascinated with evil deeds of the past - just as there’s never any shortage of people wanting to take part in a tour of the old stomping ground of Jack the Ripper in the East End. And for Ip and Court, researching the details of the most horrific crimes of the past is the “best bit” of creating the series. But the third run of the show, unlike the other two, is not about copycats.Rather it is about how the police team at the heart of the series is able to use crimes of the past to solve modern day murders.

As Rupert Penry-Jones, who plays DI Joseph Chandler in the show, explains: “It’s about using the past as a map. But all the stories, the things we used, are real. And some of them are pretty ghastly.”

Once Ip and Court had decided this was the approach they were going to take with the series, a whole new world of crime opened up to them. The new series features six episodes, with three stories each told across two parts.

In story one, crimes from the past used to aid the police team include the Ratcliffe Murders, which took place in 1811, and which saw a man called John Williams arrested for murder, with Williams actually committing suicide in prison. He was buried with a stake through his heart at the junction of Commercial Road and Cannon Street Road. Other crimes referenced in the series as ones the police use to help them solve the murders they are investigating include those of Dr Crippen and a woman called Mary Ann Cotton, who may have murdered as many as 21 people.

Court explains: “Once we had the idea of using historical precedents to solve cases - in the same way criminal profiling, where criminal’s personalities and victim selection helps solve crimes, but using facts to solve modern crimes - we had every crime since forever at our fingertips.”

But Ip adds: “We had to free ourselves from focusing on the East End. And it was important to use old crimes - and we do deliberately leave out the last 50 years because we want to be sensitive. With more recent crimes you have survivors’ families and so on. We do want this show to be entertaining but we don’t want to upset anyone.”

To write the series, Ip and Court, who met and started writing together when they were students at the National Film and Television School, say they have to do “loads” of research. They write the scripts together and for each episode draw up a list of “precedents they would like to include”. They also admit to overwriting for each hour episode, saying there is quite a lot that “does not make it in”.

With the series now in its third outing, the writers, who have a shared interest in horror films from the 1970s and 80s, including The Exorcist and The Shining, are able to pen scripts with the actors - including Penry-Jones and Davis - in mind. They also have discussions with the cast about the roles they play and the show’s storylines.

“You write a character and the actor starts to inhabit the character,” Ip says. “So we sit down and talk to them about the way their characters are going to be developed, which makes sense as they have got to live it, so it has to feel real for them. Their input is really important.”

They have even discovered things about the roles they created that they did not know existed. Take Penry-Jones’ role for example.

“We had him down as a clean, very particular man,” Ip explains. “But then someone said he had OCD, and it was like, ‘Okay, he has OCD then’.”

This OCD sees Penry-Jones’ character feel the need to change his shirt several times in one episode, resulting in a scene which sees the actor naked from the waist up.

Clearly Penry-Jones’ bare chest explains why many women tune in to the drama, with one female member of the press at the launch of series three even asking if she could get stills of the scene in question. But surely, dashing actor aside, the dark, gruesome nature of the drama means it appeals to men more than women?

Ip disagrees.

“Have you never noticed how, in WH Smith, there are loads of magazines about true crime, which are really gruesome but they’re all aimed at women,” she says. “Women are fascinated by it, because we are the victims.”

She adds: “I think women like to read about things that happen to a woman who is just like them - a mother, a housewife -where the killer was a husband, just like their husband.”

This aside, Ip and Court hope clearly hope the show appeals to everyone - male and female - and that they get to bring the drama back for a fourth run on ITV.

Because, as Court rightly points out: “History has crimes that are full of twists and turns. Once you look at the details, you realise they are great stories. And we have lots of stories to tell.”

• The third series of Whitechapel begins on ITV1 on Monday (January 30) at 9pm