I could waste the bulk of this review describing what happens when Ross Kemp does his documentaries about violent criminals, but if you’re reading this, then you probably have a strong idea what Ross Kemp: Mafia and Britain is going to be like. The ex-EastEnder has a question about something dodgy, talks to some experts about hard men, talks to some hard men, talks to some other hard men about hard men, looks off towards the horizon like a shooting-cap-wearing Philomena Cunk, then asks another, bigger question, setting off the whole chain of hard-men-on-hard-men once again.
But his bombastic style of documentary-making passes an hour very quickly, and Kemp and his team have found a fascinating subject to explore: do or did the mafia ever operate in the UK, despite a persistent belief that one of the oldest organised crime groups in the world never really got a foothold over here? He begins by going back to the early 80s, and the discovery of a body hanging beneath Blackfriars Bridge in the middle of London. I know about this case, having once taken family members on a tourist boat trip down the Thames, where we quickly learned that our cheerful tour guide was more interested in giving the full details of what is now assumed to have been a gruesome mafia hit than he was in pointing out Big Ben.
