Nobody actually twirls a waxed moustache or ties a hapless heroine to the railway tracks, but in every other respect BBC 1's Ripper Street is just a Charlie Chaplin kick up the bum away from being a Mack Sennett comedy - with sound!
True, in last Sunday's episode, Paul McGann looked as though he desperately wanted to do some moustache twirling and, as the villain of the piece, he did get his just desserts on a railway line - electrified in this case - but the regular cast keep remarkably straight faces throughout. In Matthew Macfadyen's case, as the troubled Inspector Reid, I suspect it's simply the face he was born with. He has the sort of face that looks like it wants to be lugubrious when it grows up, but in the meantime will settle for being immobile.
Jerome Flynn continues his renaissance after his sterling work on Game of Thrones as Reid's trusty sidekick, Detective Sergeant Drake, a man whose preferred method of interrogation makes the Sweeney look like pacifists.
Whether it's the end of the pier melodrama, the violence or the mock Victorian dialogue that grabs you, the whole thing is quite superb and just the thing to liven up a Sunday evening's viewing. If you haven't given it a go yet, I can thoroughly recommend it.
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