It may be strangely seductive, but who says our true crime viewing has to be an amoral gorefest? A gripping new series shows a genre on a mission

True crime TV finds itself on a sterling run of form at the moment. Shows such as The Jinx, Making A Murderer and The Keepers introduced a generation of TV audiences to a life of crime and the attendant vicarious thrills. Tonight, BBC Four makes its contribution with The Yorkshire Ripper Files: A Very British Crime Story, its three-part exploration of Peter Sutcliffe’s murders of women and girls between 1975 and 1980. The Ripper was the most memorable of a string of garishly named bogeymen that haunted the landscape of the 1970s. The Devil’s Disciple, Black Panther and the Beast of Manchester all had their moments in the limelight, but it was the Ripper who truly captured the public imagination. A faceless hammer killer from the pages of a penny dreadful, he struck without warning or mercy – a truly enduring monster.

Maybe that’s the problem with true crime in general – our meat-headed tendency to make stars of the perpetrators.

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