London thriller is a real Ripper Adam Rothenberg plays colourful character Homer Jackson on Ripper Street. IT'S April, 1889, and the residents of East London are clinging to the hope that peace is returning to their streets. Six months have passed since the last Jack the Ripper killing and some feel the murderer's reign of terror may have run its course. But panic returns when a young woman is found brutally murdered, the hallmarks of the Ripper upon her. Chief Inspector Frederick Abberline (Clive Russell) is adamant Jack's back, but fellow cop Edmund Reid (Matthew Macfadyen) suspects a new brand of evil is at work. Reid, brawny police officer Bennett Drake (Jerome Flynn) and mercurial surgeon Homer Jackson (Adam Rothenberg) join forces to comb factories, pubs and darkened cobbled laneways to try to crack the case. Easier said than done. The cops are responsible for policing an area of just 2 square kilometres, but in that area are 67,000 people - many of whom are poor and dispossessed. This BBC-produced period series was an instant hit in the UK, premiering to 7.9 million viewers. Flynn, who is renowned for his role as Bronn in hit series Game of Thrones, has a theory on why the series has resonated so strongly with its audience. "It's the element of having Jack the Ripper almost like he's in the piece and yet he's never there," Flynn says. The legend that he became in his own lifetime. The reverberations of this. The fact that he was never caught. Deep in our psyche that's where it all started and that's where we join Ripper Street. Jack has just killed the last of his known victims and yet the fact that he was never caught means there's something incomplete in this bit of the London psyche. That is kind of haunting and informing the whole piece. What excited me was the richness of characters. That made it stand apart from other police dramas. And the richness of life at that time. It's almost got a western feel to it. It's not like everybody knows what they're doing. There is a freedom of life at that time. Life is less controlled and that's exciting. More and more as society has gone on, everyone is controlled and boxed up and you know what you're doing and you know who the police are. And London at that time was very much out of control. It was kind of almost a joke trying to bring law to those streets because it was a lawless place. Rothenberg gets to play Ripper Street's most colourful character. Homer Jackson is an expert in the world of early forensics and has unique skills on the autopsy slab. But Jackson also has his vices - women, booze, drugs and gambling. "Ripper Street has elements of CSI cop shows, set in Victorian London," Rothenberg says. So you get to see people who are developing the science. You get to see the creative process involved in trying to piece together the details of various crimes. And you're invited along into the thought process behind it. On top of that you have riveting characters. Very strong interpersonal conflict. And it's beautiful. I mean, it really does have it all.