Director – Lewis Arnold, Teleplay – George Kay, Based on the Book Wicked Beyond Belief: The Hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper (2003) by Michael Bilton, Producer – Matt Sandford, Photography – Ed Rutherford, Music – Sarah Warne, Visual Effects – The Flying Colour Company, Production Design – Anna Higginson. Production Company – New Pictures Ltd/AW3 Media.
Cast
David Morrissey (DCS George Oldfield), Michael McElhatton (CC Ronald Gregory), Toby Jones (DCS Dennis Hoban), Lee Ingleby (DCS Jim Hobson), Steven Waddington (DSI Dick Holland), Liz White (PS Meg Winterburn), Jasmine Lee-Jones (Marcella Claxton), Daniel Mays (Sydney Jackson), Jack Deam (DI Les Hanley), Stephen Tompkinson (David Gee), Kris Hitchen (DC John Nunn), Victoria Myers (WPC Sue Neave), Mark Stobbart (Peter Sutcliffe), Robert-James Collier (DCS Jack Ridgeway), Katherine Kelly (Emily Jackson), Ian Lloyd-Anderson (Terence Hawkshaw), Neil McKinven (Sir David McNee), John Henshaw (Mike Dugdale), Jill Halfpenny (Doreen Hill), Dorothy Atkinson (Betty Hoban), Shaun Thomas (Neil Jackson), Roger Ringrose (Wilf MacDonald), Kate Rutter (Irene MacDonald), Alex Davies (Ruth Bundey), Natalie Gavin (George Showalter), Daisy Waterstone (Jacqueline Hill), Nicola Stephenson (Olive Smeldt), Kirsty Mather (Paula Dodd), Gemma Laurie (Wilma McCann), Orla Fitzgerald (Anna Rogulskyj), Shaun Dooley (DCS Chris Gregg), Adam James (Desmond Wilcox), Sammy Winward (Sonia Sutcliffe), Emma Cunniffe (Margaret Oldfield), Paul Brennen (Jack Hill)
Plot
West Yorkshire, 1975. Police struggle to deal with a killer who is attacking and killing women in the area and leaving their dead bodies out in the open. The killer is given the nickname The Yorkshire Ripper. The police focus on prostitutes, believing they are the killer’s target, and set up patrols of red light districts, building up an extensive card file of number plates of drivers frequenting the area. At the same time, civilians who were attacked and survived are dismissed when the try to report because they were not prostitutes. However, as the murders drags on for years without any clues as to the identity of The Ripper, there is criticism of the police’s handling of the case in the press. DCS George Oldfield, the head of the case, believes they have a breakthrough when a tape is sent by from someone with a Geordie accent taunting the police. A massive hunt is mounted to identify the voice on the tape.
The Yorkshire Ripper is the second most prolific serial killer in British history (the first is Harold Shipman). The so-called Ripper killings began in 1975. The massive manhunt for the Ripper gained a huge, even international profile. Officially the Ripper killed thirteen women between 1975 and 1981, while wounding one other who made an escape. There were however up to twenty others that have been speculated as being his victims and others who are believed to have survived attacks. After a huge police search, the Ripper was finally identified as being truck driver Peter Sutcliffe, who was initially taken into custody for driving a vehicle with stolen plates whereupon he confessed to the crimes. He was given a life sentence and died in prison in 2020 of Covid, aged 74.
There have been several other film and tv works devoted to the Yorkshire Ripper prior to The Long Shadow. These include This is Personal: The Hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper (2000), a four part dramatised tv series from Granada featuring Alun Armstrong as DCS George Oldfield. There have been two very good documentary tv series The Yorkshire Ripper Files: A Very British Crime Story (2019) and The Ripper (2020). The Yorkshire Ripper and police force also forms a backdrop in the Red Riding (2009) trilogy of films and the case features as part of the story in the second film In the Year of Our Lord 1980 – the Red Riding trilogy also shares a surprising number of cast overlaps with The Long Shadow with the likes of David Morrissey, Daniel Mays, John Henshaw and Shaun Dooley
Since the 1980s, The Yorkshire police force have come in for particular criticism for their mishandling of the Ripper case and for following red herring leads that took the case off in wrong directions for years – their insistent belief that the Ripper only targeted prostitutes and focusing their investigation around such, while ignoring reports from women who were not prostitutes, later resulting in actual witnesses who could identify the Ripper refusing to come forward for fear of being labelled as prostitutes; the obsession with the killer having a Geordie accent (someone from the northeast of England near the Scottish border) due to the faked tape recording that had been sent in (the scenes where Sutcliffe is finally arrested even show him nearly being let go because he doesn’t have a Geordie accent). The mini-series does a particularly good job at portraying the police wrong-headeness – there is something quite brutal to the scenes of Jasmine Lee-Jones trying to report her assault and being dismissed as being a prostitute by the interviewing officers.
David Morrissey as DCS George Oldfield. With Steven Waddington in the background
The writing in the show is excellent. Unlike another True Crime film Boston Strangler (2023), which came out six months earlier the same year but went with unfounded theories and inflated the involvement of the real-life characters, The Long Shadow closely adheres to the facts and does a very accurate replication of what happened during the case. The end of the last episode shows actual photos of the real-life people the characters are based on and the resemblances to the actors playing the parts is often uncanny. The period setting is admirably well achieved. One aspect I particularly liked was the way that the shooting of the streets at night instils a palpable sense of ominous fear about the dangers that could be lurking and just what lone women out there must have felt.
Moreover, The Long Shadow follows the case on all levels from the police investigation from the prostitutes on the streets, the victims’ families to the girls responsible for maintaining the card system, even one ignored attack victim and her struggle to receive compensation and the parents of one victim who began a protest movement in their daughter’s name. Particularly good is the writing in Episode 4 when Ian Lloyd-Anderson is brought in, resembling the photo fits for Sutcliffe, where the show deliberately does not give his name and toys with the possibility the police might have the killer in their interrogation room, before letting us down.
Toby Jones is an actor that has emerged into his own in the last few years and projects an air of trustworthy authority despite his diminutive size (5’5”) – the disappointment of The Long Shadow is that it starts with him as the head of the investigation and shows him to have a keen mind with the indication that he is a figure that you are meant to follow, only for him to be sidelined a couple of episodes in. His replacement gets to be David Morrissey, initially unrecognisable, made up with rosacea speckled cheeks and severe double-bridge aviator glasses, who comes in with a hard-headed certainty that carries much of the show.
