It is a primetime drama that has been eagerly awaited but not necessarily welcomed – especially in some parts of the country. Last night, ITV aired the first episode of The Long Shadow, a seven-part series about the 13 women murdered by Peter Sutcliffe, known as the Yorkshire Ripper, between 1975 and 1980. The synopsis says it is “sensitively focusing on the lives of the victims who crossed his path and those of the officers at the heart of the police investigation”.
Raking over such painful memories was never going to be popular in West Yorkshire, where Sutcliffe carried out the majority of his attacks, and where women spent five years living in terror.
We are talking about relatively recent events. His surviving victims – the youngest is only in her 50s – and the families of those he killed still live in the area, and the wounds are far from healed. Bradford council refused to help facilitate the filming, saying: “The story of this very dark and painful era has been told many times, including within well-researched documentaries which have given survivors and victims’ families a voice.”
Perhaps it is unfortunate for the writer George Kay and the director Lewis Arnold that The Long Shadow has come at a time when people in this part of the north of England, particularly women who are still living with residual trauma, are sick of dredging up the past. But things are not helped by some of the choices made in the first episode, which largely fails to deliver on its pledge to focus on the victims. Viewers learn little about the first two women Sutcliffe murdered, and the narrative predominantly follows the investigating officers
Katherine Kelly’s portrayal of Emily Jackson, who was killed in 1976, might end up being the standout performance, and yet we don’t see much of Jackson as a person who isn’t connected to her role as a wife and mother, or her sex work. Wilma McCann’s existence is relegated to an appearance as a loving mother kissing her children goodbye before she is found dead ahead of the opening titles.
Police misogyny seems to be channelled through one minor detective – a bad apple, if you will – to make the main characters we follow more palatable. It’s simply not truthful and is very frustrating to watch when we know sexism in the police force caused unfathomable failings that led to the deaths of women.
What we have seen so far is setting the series up to be primarily about police officers tormented by their own failure. In short, it is once again a story about men. It’s not a bad drama, it’s just not the drama we wanted to see.
There is no doubt Kay, who wrote Lupin, Hijack and Litvinenko, is an excellent writer. But we should not ignore the fact he is also a privately educated man from the south. A lot has been made in interviews of the production team visiting the north and speaking to people here during the four-year process of putting The Long Shadow together, and it’s not deliberately patronising, I’m sure. But Leeds is a television city – we have writers, directors and producers. It’s simply not necessary to dispatch them from London.
This simply isn’t the best way to produce compelling work. The finest dramas of recent years have come from people writing about their own communities – take Sally Wainwright’s Happy Valley in Calderdale, James Graham’s Sherwood in Nottinghamshire and Tony Schumacher’s The Responder in Liverpool. Effortlessly cliche-free, they don’t need the authenticity artificially added by visits to the communities; they know them inside out.
Of course, everyone should be able to turn their hand to telling any story they wish, but that is not what is happening. Posh people are telling the stories of working-class people and also their own – think The Crown (Peter Morgan, educated at St Paul’s) or Downton Abbey (Julian Fellowes, landed gentry) – leaving working-class people, women in particular, almost entirely absent as TV writers and directors. When working-class women are given the opportunity to write for television, it is almost always as an adaptation of their own book, having already proved its success.
How different would the story of the working-class women terrorised by Peter Sutcliffe have been if it was told by a woman who had lived it? Or by one, like me, who grew up hearing their mother’s and grandmother’s stories of nights out watching each other’s backs? Of marches, of stupid things said by sexist men, of being failed by the police? Indeed, someone who is still experiencing those things? We don’t know. And it feels like a long time before we’ll find out.
Robyn Vinter is north of England correspondent at the Guardian
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