TV review: Jack The Ripper: Tabloid Killer

By Jeremy Clay

Kelvin MacKenzie is appalled. Disgusted. Outraged, even.

The ex-editor of The Sun has got himself into a tizz on Jack The Ripper: Tabloid Killer (8pm, Five), one of his intermittent attempts to forge himself a shiny new career on the telly.

Here he is, brandishing a copy of the Victorian newspaper which tried to pin the blame for the Ripper on the Jews.

“This was a disgraceful moment in journalism,” he says.

Quite so. But a little hard to take, perhaps, from the man who gave us ‘the truth’ about Hillsborough. And the infamous Gotcha front page. And who printed a photo of the victim in the Ealing vicarage rape case.

As to the show itself, well that was merely ... meh.

There have been umpteen documentaries about Jack the Ripper down the years, and the best to be said about this is that it was another one.

Actually, that’s a little harsh. MacKenzie had taken a slightly different line than the usual morbid Ripper-docs, with their barely-concealed enthusiasm for gore.

Instead, he stuck to what he knows best: the press.

This was as much a show about newspapers as it was about the most infamous murders in history.

MacKenzie used the case to ponder how the killings had given birth to a brash new type of journalism. London evening paper The Star was launched just before the murders began, he pointed out, and quickly upped its sales on a public appetite for ghastly detail.

It was a cheap, racy paper, said MacKenzie, with an editor who wanted to “hit the reader right between the eyes and didn’t really care if the story was true or not”.

Let’s leave it there. We’re all thinking the same thing.

There were some sorry stories on Spain: Paradise Lost (9pm, ITV): miserable tales of dream homes under the threat of the wrecker’s ball, of life savings lavished upon whimsical business plans and of retired sun-seekers having to head home and find work.

But it was the insular lives of the expats that really left an impression.

They cluster together in Britholes on the coast.

They read British newspapers. They watch British TV. They stock up on HP Sauce and PG Tips in British-run supermarkets.

They get their hair cut in British-run salons and they drink in British theme pubs. Many of them on last night’s show hadn’t even made the slightest effort to learn the language, beyond a cursory couple of nursery school-level phrases.

All of which is fine, I suppose, if that’s what they want out of life.

But I trust that when they come back to these shores for a visit, they’re not the types who grumble about immigrants who stick to their own and refuse to learn English.

That would be hypocritical, wouldn’t it.