Video: Ripper Street: gruesome new crime drama set in the east end of London Each week the pair, along with American surgeon Captain Homer Jackson (Adam Rothenberg), solve a different violent crime on the streets of Whitechapel, London. "It's not an area that was short of vicious murders and any woman found murdered with a knife in the consequent months was held up as a Ripper murder," says director Tom Shankland. So we'll touch on Ripper in that way but not dig anybody up or change the canonical five. Indeed, this is not the comparatively polite, Dickens-esq world of Victorian London. "All the period depictions I'd seen of that particular crime story had almost been a bit too well behaved in a slightly slower way and shots have to be a bit wider to show off the nice furniture," says director Tom Shankland. But if you can think of something awful [in Victorian London], it was happening. The character of Edmund Reid is based on a policeman who was part of the Ripper investigations, but only in name. He was a remarkable man but I didn't base it on him. He was a balloonist, and a druid, and 5 ft 6," says Macfadyen. The police would have felt incredibly modern at the time, in many ways they were stumbling around a bit, before scientific advancement, fingerprints and forensics. Made alongside BBC America, the series has already begun to recoup its hefty budget, having been sold to broadcasters in Norway, Canada and Australia. Ripper Street is due to air later in the year.