Tuesday

The Yorkshire Ripper Files: A Very British Crime Story 9pm, BBC Four/

As a rule, true crime documentaries tend to the exploitative, the lurid and the grubby. A dozen such films already exist about Peter Sutcliffe. But The Yorkshire Ripper Files: A Very British Crime Story, is not another. Showing across three consecutive nights this week, director Liza Williams’s documentary is a sober, serious, almost forensic examination that not only sets the case firmly in the larger social context of its times, but convincingly argues that it was precisely that context that allowed Sutcliffe to go on attacking and killing women for as long as he did between 1975 and 1981.

At the heart of the series lies one question: did Britain’s attitudes towards women in the late 1970s, particularly as held within the police force, allow Sutcliffe to evade justice and continue killing long after he could have been caught? The series provides compelling evidence to support the thesis.

In particular, Williams focuses on the popular image that grew up around the initial murders in Leeds: that Sutcliffe was “on a mission to kill prostitutes,” and how that idea intertwined with wider attitudes about sex workers – the idea that these women’s lives were less important, that they somehow “deserved what they got.” Time and again, in the staggering wealth of archive footage, we encounter investigating officers saying things like, “Most of his victims have been of somewhat dubious moral character...”

Williams explores how such victim blaming had a direct influence on the progress of the investigation, by highlighting how the police consistently dismissed the crucial evidence of woman who had survived attacks by Sutcliffe, but didn’t fit their “prostitute killer” theory – despite their assaults bearing all the same hallmarks.

For example, Tracey Brown was attacked by Sutcliffe in 1975, two months before he killed his first known victim, Wilma McCann. But when, in 1977, Brown pointed out to police that her original description of her attacker closely matched the “Ripper” photofit that had just been provided by another surviving victim, Marilyn Moore, her evidence was discounted, because she was a schoolgirl when she was attacked, and therefore, by their logic, simply not on the murderer’s radar.

The most shocking illustration of this kind of thinking comes when Williams examines coverage of the 1977 murder of 16-year-old Jayne McDonald. Unable to make her fit their accepted profile of a “Ripper” victim, newspapers actually framed the killing as a “terrible mistake” on the killer’s part. A jaw-dropping open letter from The Yorkshire Evening Post reads: “How did you feel yesterday when you learned your blood-stained crusade against streetwalkers had gone so horribly wrong? Your vengeful knife had found so innocent a target?”

Even more telling than the archive material, however, is how we can still hear the same prejudices and judgemental attitudes persisting in new interviews Williams conducts with some of those involved in the case back then. This, though, perhaps shouldn’t be such a surprise. As recently as 2006, when a serial killer murdered five people in Ipswich, most media coverage constantly presented his victims as sex workers first, young women last.

Williams, who is in her mid-thirties, wasn’t alive when Sutcliffe was attacking and killing woman, yet she does a superb job of evoking the period, the particular darkness that clung to the air. In some ways, watching the old footage makes it all seem like another world. In others, it feels like the day before yesterday.

DAILY HIGHLIGHTS

Sunday

The Believers Are But Brothers

10pm, BBC Four

Originally an ambitious, provocative stage piece, this film by writer Javaad Alipoor was always going to be relevant, but recent events have made it almost depressingly timely. Alipoor’s theme is the radicalisation of disaffected young men online, which entails a journey through some of the internet’s darkest echo chambers. Drawn from his own heavy research, Alipoor presents the stories of four fictional characters: an ISIS recruiter; two British recruits; and an Alt-Right 'white boy' from California. These are used to explore the real voices, resentments and fantasies colliding out there in the anonymous mirror maze of social media, private chatrooms, gaming worlds and sites like 4chan: a toxic mix of the harmlessly bizarre and the horrific, where fantasy and reality blur, and truth lies where you want it to lie.

Monday

The Inventor: Out For Blood In Silicon Valley 9pm, Sky Atlantic Imagine a blood-testing tool that could test for 200 diseases based on a single finger prick: imagine the hours of lab time saved, the fortunes in money saved, all the lives potentially saved. Thing is, you’ll have to imagine it, because, despite the claims of Theranos – the Silicon Valley company that announced it had designed just such a revolutionary gizmo – the technology doesn’t exist. This inconvenient fact, however, didn’t prevent serious players with serious money from believing and investing in Theranos and its barely-20-year-old guru, Elizabeth Holmes, leading to her start-up being valued at $9 billion – a sum that deflated to zero when the sham claims were exposed, and Holmes and her team were charged with fraud. Director Alex Gibney’s documentary details the story in fascinating, at times excruciating detail. A modern take on the emperor’s new clothes, set against the high-tech house of cards.

Wednesday

Hull's Headscarf Heroes

11pm, BBC Four

A deserved repeat for director Steve Humphries’s excellent documentary, shining a light on a fight led entirely by women rising from the streets, who took on the establishment and won a victory that saved countless lives for generations to come. The film looks back to winter 1968, when the sinking of three trawlers in quick succession devastated Hull’s fishing industry. 58 men died at sea, losses that ripped through the city’s tight-knit fishing community. With the local trawler fleet run along near feudal lines, the work had long been hazardous, but the sinking of those ships galvanised the women into action, mounting a campaign to improve safety. Leading the charge came the magnificent Lillian Bilocca, who became the soul, heart and muscle of the group, facing down police, violence and local resentment like a combination of Anna Magnani and Diana Dors.

Thursday

Dead Pixels

9.30pm, E4

Meg (Alexa Davies) has an urgent decision to make. She’s been fixed up on a mixed-doubles badminton match as a way of meeting a potential new boyfriend. But then comes the message that Castle Blackfinger is under siege and about to fall to rampaging hordes. Does she stay and chase the shuttlecock? Or does she run to defend the kingdom? Adapted from his short web series Avatards, writer Jon Brown’s sitcom centres on three pals – Meg, Nicky (Will Merrick) and Usman (Sargon Yelda) – whose lives, to varying degrees, revolve around playing the online game Kingdom Scrolls, a swords-and-sandals fantasy involving lots of slaughter. Brown tends to write lines rather than dialogue, leaving the viewer playing predict-the-punchline, but the dynamic between characters is well observed, especially when the new guy at Meg’s office asks to join their virtual band, disrupting the chemistry.

Friday

Hanna

Amazon Prime/

The Beatles: Made In Merseyside

9pm, BBC Four

You can tell you’re getting old when they start remaking stuff you feel was only out five minutes ago. Amazon’s eight-part thriller Hanna is a reworking of the brilliant 2011 movie about a teenage girl raised in isolation in a wintry European forest by her father, who obsessively trains her in survival and assassination – skills she needs when a black-ops CIA officer comes hunting. Created by the film’s co-writer David Farr, the series ditches the movie’s demented fairy tale ir for a more dour action realism. It’s slightly less interesting, but the story remains solid and propulsive enough to carry it, and Farr extends events well beyond the original plot. Well worth checking out. Elsewhere, another familiar story gets remade in Alan Byron’s documentary on the Beatles’ earliest years, as four working class teenagers remade the world, armed only with rock 'n' roll.

Saturday

Dave Allen: God’s Own Comedian

9pm, BBC Two

Another Saturday when the best things on TV are repeats. The best, of course, is the continuing unravelling of the Tutti Frutti saga (9pm, BBC Scotland). But close second is God’s Own Comedian, an excellent 2013 documentary on Allen, the sly monologue master with the eternal fag and glass, which not only explores his particular approach to comedy, but includes a reminder of the serious acting he did in the Alan Bennett play One Fine Day – we could do with a repeat of that some night. It’s part of a BBC Two evening devoted to Allen, followed by Dave Allen At Peace (10pm), the biopic starring Aidan Gillen, which doesn’t really capture the man, and Dave Allen: The Immaculate Selection (11pm), a compilation of some of his slyest, strangest and angriest bits.