‘Ripper Street’ episode 1 – Info and picture gallery

Check out the info and picture gallery for episode 1 of ‘Ripper Street,’ which airs Sunday 30 December at 9pm on BBC One.

April 1889 – six months since the last Jack the Ripper killing. East London is emerging into a fragile peace, hopeful that this killer’s reign of terror might at last have run its course. Nowhere is this truer than in the corridors of H Division, the police precinct charged with keeping order in the chaos of Whitechapel. Its men hunted this maniac – and failed to find him.

Ripper Street is their story. A police procedural set in the teeming streets of the East End as it moves into the last decade of the 19th century. H Division was responsible for policing a relatively small area of just 1¼ square miles, yet into that space were packed some 67,000 people: a seething, bustling mass of the poor and dispossessed.

Between the factories, rookeries, chop shops and pubs that mark out this maelstrom moves Detective Inspector Edmund Reid (Matthew Macfadyen) – a forward thinking detective haunted by a tragic past mistake. Accompanied by the ever loyal local brawn of Detective Sergeant Bennett Drake (Jerome Flynn) and the mercurial brilliance of the US Army surgeon and one-time Pinkerton detective, Captain Homer Jackson (Adam Rothenberg), Reid seeks to bring justice to a world that is forever on the brink of mayhem.

Ripper Street is a fictionalised trek into the heart of a London borough living in the blood soaked aftermath of that forever anonymous killer. It is an investigative procedural about dedicated policemen for whom life – and crime – go on.

In the first episode of Ripper Street, a young woman is found brutally murdered, the hallmark signs of the Ripper upon her. One time H Division boss, Chief Inspector Frederick Abberline, believes it Jack’s return, but Reid – the precinct’s new master – suspects a different evil at work.

Inspector Edmund Reid – Matthew Macfadyen, Sergeant Bennet Drake Jerome Flynn, Captain Homer Jackson – Adam Rothenberg, Long Susan – Myanna Buring, Emily Reid – Amanda Hale, Deborah Goren – Lucy Cohu, Rose – Charlene McKenna, Constable Dick Hobbs – Jonathan Barnwell, Sergeant Donald Artherton – David Wilmot, Fred Best – David Dawson, Chief Inspector Frederick Abberline – Clive Russell.