Mail Keeps Up Telly Attack

As I noted last week, the obedient hackery of the legendarily foul mouthed Paul Dacre failed in their attempt to use the Daily Mail’s attack on Channel 4’s Big Fat Quiz Of 2012 to generate a second Sachsgate. No-one would have traded places with the unfortunate Mail staffers who had to break the bad news to the Vagina Monologue in his modern day Fuehrerbunker.

Did you compare me to f***ing Hitler, c***?!?

But television must keep on being portrayed as the Great Evil: the Mail cannot or will not raise its own level of credibility or accuracy, so broadcast media has to be dragged down into the same gutter as that inhabited by the cheaper end of the Fourth Estate. And at the front of the cab rank for hatchet job duty this time is the author of the Stephen Gately hatchet job, Jan Moir.

“Who decided to make the BBC's Sunday night period drama an anti-women orgy of gore?” demands this least savoury of Dacre’s Glendas, as she turns the attack away from Channel 4 and back to the hated Beeb. The Corporation has launched a new drama series for Sunday nights called Ripper Street, set in London in the days following the disappearance of Jack The Ripper.

What Ms Moir really looks like

Back then, the Police force was in its infancy, and with the ingrained poverty and disease of London’s East End, made worse by the numbers of people living together in what was a very small area for its population, meant that life was cheap, crime was frequent, and all too often violent (yes, the penalty when criminals got caught was severe, but then, all too often they didn’t get caught).

This is discussed by Richard Warlow, the lead writer for Ripper Street, who talks of “Policing the meanest streets imaginable” and also of “Committed lawmen doing the best they can in the most impossible circumstances”. The series will feature “not just murderers ... but ... pornographers, child gangs, slum landlords, vigilantes and anarchists”. And it is broadcast after the 2100 hours watershed.

Thus most viewers concerned about the potential content can add two and two and figure out the result. But not Jan Moir, who, after briefly slobbering over the male leads, wails “How did Ripper Street ... get past the censors ... or indeed anyone at the BBC with a modicum of sense or sensibility?”, this after condemning the series as “woman-hating”. That’s one draughty glasshouse.

After all, Mail Online today is featuring such pro-woman content as Lacey Banghard promoting her own range of condoms, Britney Spears without a bra on, a Daisy Lowe lingerie shoot, Katy Perry in micro shorts, and Helen Flanagan in tears after missing her flight (but fully clothed). So Jan Moir and her editor have no room to call out anyone else for being “woman hating”.

And nor have they any complaint about Ripper Street, except that it’s on the BBC.