Ripper Street

Series two, episode one
‘Lost men gather here and find what they can’. Yep, that sounds like London to us. Certainly, the opening episode of this second series contains a couple of highly promising new ‘lost men’, particularly Joseph Mawle’s dodgy cop Jedediah Shine. ‘Ripper Street’ still feels a touch over-stylised and there’s often the sense that, in plotting terms at least, there’s less to it than meets the eye.

But ‘Peaky Blinders’ for one, owed plenty to its murkily brutal, pre-modern charisma and it’s never less than watchable. Tonight, Matthew Macfadyen’s earnest Detective Inspector Reid has a new reason to sigh despairingly as some bad business in Chinatown leads him to a new drug that’s set to take the underworld by storm.