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Exciting things to come!

16 May

I have a couple of exciting things coming up for this blog that I’d like to share with you! The cool thing to do, of course, would be to keep schtum and for it all to be a lovely surprise but I’m afraid that isn’t how I roll. I’m an impatient, excitable sort of person, you see.

First of all, I will be attending the advance press day of the glorious new exhibition Dressing the Stars, which will be running from the 12th July until the 29th August at Bath Fashion Museum! This show sounds utterly gorgeous and will include costumes from The Duchess, Elizabeth, Pirates of the Caribbean, Sense and Sensibility, The Young Victoria, The King’s Speech, Gladiator, Shakespeare in Love and more.

‘On display will be around forty costumes worn by stars including Colin Firth and Helena Bonham Carter in The King’s Speech and those worn by Keira Knightley in The Duchess, much of which was shot at the Assembly Rooms in Bath. Other costumes on display will include those worn by Kate Winslet and Emma Thompson in Sense and Sensibility, Orlando Bloom in Pirates of the Caribbean, Cate Blanchett in Elizabeth, Gwyneth Paltrow in Shakespeare in Love, and Meryl Streep in The French Lieutenant’s Woman.’

Can’t wait to see it and report back to you all!

July looks like it’s going to be a busy month for Madame Guillotine as I will also be making a trip to Kensington Palace to see the gorgeous and magical Enchanted Palace exhibition in the state apartments there and also, more excitingly, meet with one of the curators of the costume departments for a behind the scenes view of some pieces from their amazing collection of Royal ceremonial garments. I don’t know yet what I will be seeing, as they will be choosing them for me which makes it even more exciting!

What I do know is that I won’t be seeing the Duchess of Cambridge’s wedding dress!

As we don’t go to London all that often these days, we’ve decided to go for a couple of days so that the boys can go to the Doctor Who Experience at Earl’s Court. We’ll also be visiting the Natural History Museum, Science Museum, Victoria and Albert Museum, Tate Gallery and Dennis Severs’ House in Spitalfields. I may try to get to the Titanic exhibition at the O2 as well, but it sounds like we already have our days packed with goodies! It’s just a pity that I will be there too soon to visit Buckingham Palace, but I can always go later on in the year when I see the Fabergé exhibition.

Rest assured that I will have my rather scary new camera with me at all times so that I can report back to you all afterwards!

More treats that I have in store for you include an interview with one of my all time favourite writers, Karleen Koen, whose new book Before Versailles: A Novel of Louis XIV is due out on the 28th of June. I can’t wait to read it, although this will mean breaking my rule of not reading novels set in the same period that I am currently writing about as I’ll be immersed in Louis XIV’s Versailles myself at the end of June!

Snapshots from my life

14 Mar

We’ve only just got round to uploading the contents of my old phone camera folder after my rather nice husband got me a lovely new iPhone 4 for Christmas and I thought I’d share some pictures with you all as I often feel like I write and write and write but you don’t know me at all!

The picture above is of the Circus in Bath, which is a very stately round square indeed. Um, a round square? You know what I mean – it’d be a Square if it was square but it isn’t, it’s more of a circle, which makes it an um Circle? Anyway, it’s very nice.We’re lucky enough to live quite near to Bath so I get to go there quite regularly – I’m going at the end of this month in fact to visit the Fashion Museum and study some eighteenth century dresses.

This is me. I thought this haircut looked terrible but actually it’s not that bad is it? I don’t know where this photograph was taken – I think it might have been in Giraffe in Bristol, thus the red tinted glooooom. I look a bit WILD EYED don’t I? Sadly, I was probably sober when this was taken.

The Eden Project in the winter dusk.

SNOW. Yes, we’ve mostly all seen it before but I love the eerie almost neon blue of the light in this picture.

Bristol Suspension Bridge.

This is why I have trouble losing weight.

Trafalgar Square on a sunny morning before I ventured into the bowels of the National Gallery to see the Lady Jane Grey exhibition.

Christ Church, Spitalfields. There’s only one thing to be done when in the grip of a merciless GIN hangover – head to Whitechapel…

The Ten Bells, Spitalfields.

A bright corner of Bristol.

A happy young man.

Yo! Sushi, Cabot Circus, Bristol. The tower on the left is mine, the one on the right is Dave’s.

A metro station by the Palais Royale in Paris. This was our view as we ate our supper on our first night there last year.

Vegetarian lunch on the Rue Bac in  Paris. Dave and Felix were at the top of the Eiffel Tower while I ate this.

A Queen’s head that had mysteriously appeared on the side of a dryer in our local laundrette. It’s okay, I don’t live in Eastenders – we have a functioning washing machine but it decided to break so off to the laundrette I went for a very happy hour of reading and crisp eating.

At some point I realised that as I work from home and don’t have to see anyone if I don’t want to, I can go back to my sad youth and have pink hair again.

Well, I like it anyway.

The view from our bedroom window at The Hurst Arvon Foundation centre in Shropshire.

More reasons why I will never be slender – these beauties are from Swinky’s on Park Street in Bristol.

A fake incident room at the Whitechapel II advance screening in Mile End.

Montacute House on my last birthday.

Felix and I.

I think that sums me up quite nicely actually! Even if I missed out the random photos of gin bottles, miniature Marie Antoinettes, boots, sandwiches and curry…

Whitechapel 3

11 Mar

Long term readers of this blog will know that I am a big fan of the ITV series, Whitechapel – not just because it involves historic murder, Ripperology and the gloomy streets of my beloved East End but also because it stars Rupert Penry Jones, who is unfeasibly easy upon the eye.

I’m pretty thrilled therefore that ITV have commissioned another series and that furthermore it’s been upgraded from a three parter covering one dark story from the underbelly of the city’s grim and seedy past to a six parter covering THREE different stories.

‘Whitechapel viewers will be taken back over three hundred years as the present day investigations preoccupying Chandler and his team begin to echo crimes from the city’s darkest recesses.  Murder in the tunnels under Whitechapel, body-snatching, poisoning and grisly discoveries are amongst the tales to be told as the East End again provides fertile ground.

Executive Producer, Sally Woodward Gentle says: “I am delighted we are getting the chance to tell brand new Whitechapel stories but this time as a series.  The East End of London is steeped in history, secrets and gore and we now have the opportunity to take Chandler, Miles and Buchan to places darker still.  If you thought the Ripper and Krays were scary, just wait.”’


I’m very excited about this! I feel an affinity with the Whitechapel team as my own great great great grandfather was one of the investigating H Division in Whitechapel during the Jack the Ripper case  – although he clearly had as much success as DC Chandler in apprehending the villain! Nice to know though that Ripperology is apparently genetic…

Filming is due to begin this spring, with the series airing sometime next year. I’ll update with more information just as soon as er I have some.

 

 

Things I love: 3: Alleyways

17 Dec

Here is a picture of me in an alleyway, pretending to be Mary Jane Kelly. Yes, I actually said ‘Take a photo of me being Mary Jane Kelly’ before this was taken and this is how it turned out. I think I look a bit too cheerful to be honest.

On the other hand, it could be a lot worse. Some friends and I had a discussion recently about pretending to be Mary Jane Kelly that er I don’t think I’ll share with you now as this is a public blog. It’s worse than you are thinking though. Or maybe not. Actually no, it’s really bad.

Anyway, this is a picture of me in an alleyway. I should point out two things about this picture. Firstly, that it was not taken in the last few months as evidenced by the fact that I appear to be sporting my natural hair colour and secondly, the alleyway is not in Spitalfields but is in fact next to my mother’s old house in an unspecified location in Yorkshire.

Yes, that’s what I look like with no make up on. A few of you have been rather too kind about me lately, which is nice, but as you can see I don’t half look a bit ropey first thing in the morning, especially if I’ve had one too many gins.

I do love alleyways though. I like the way that they are functional and act as a means to get from one place to the other but also at the same time there’s something really furtive and illicit about them. ‘I wouldn’t like to meet him in a dark alleyway’ people say about men they don’t like the look of. Or indeed women.

Or if you are me and one of my friends who will remain nameless (actually a couple of my friends who will all remain heroically and discreetly nameless while I boldly and stupidly put my name to this nonsense) then ‘I wouldn’t like to meet him in a dark alleyway’ means something quite different as our idea of the perfect romantic encounter would appear to involve and here I am going to quote from an email that I received last night: ‘being shoved against a wall in an alleyway’ AND KISSED WITH WILD PASSION AND ABANDONMENT.

I’m not sure why it has become so specific. I mean any old wall would do, but no, it HAS to be an alleyway because alleyways are a bit grubby and secretive and also have a bit of Victorian Prostitute allure to them. It’s like the illicitness of alleyways rubs off onto anything that you might care to do in them, which isn’t always a bad thing. Certainly I have noticed a tendency in all of my books for people to have it away in alleyways – I guess that’s what happens when you write about Jack the Ripper though.

Anyway, this post has been totally derailed so I’d better stop before I say something really terrible. Honestly, I just wanted to talk about how much I like alleyways and instead now all I can think about is that bit in From Hell when Johnny Depp kisses Heather Bloody Graham in an alleyway. Is that on YouTube? Oh never mind, I have the DVD here.

Oh wait.

Did you know that they cut a short scene of Heather Graham actually being a prostitute out of From Hell? You can see it in the DVD extras. I expect that despite the avowed fact that her character was a prostitute, they didn’t want to actually ‘sully’ her by showing any acts of prostitution occuring. It may have helped a bit more though if they hadn’t had her roaming about 1888 Whitechapel looking like a Chanel model with a face full of make up and not a smear of dirt in sight.

And again I digress. Of course, you don’t just use alleyways for kissing! Or for standing around pretending to be Mary Jane Kelly and shouting stuff from the Withnail and From Hell scripts at each other! No no. They’re also good for running up and down when you’re drunk on gin and it’s the middle of the night in Whitechapel. Hang on, I may have a photograph of that sort of thing going on too.

I swear that I was standing upright when this photograph was taken. Honest. This was taken when we decided to tag along with a Jack the Ripper tour one night. It was great actually – we’d already started on the gin and one of my friends, Andrew Ward, was hilariously bewildered by the whole thing and eventually had to find ‘a safe place’ (Oddbins) in which to take refuge. Alleyways have that effect on people, I find.

I’ve been on quite a few Jack the Ripper walks in my time. I reckon I could do an amazing one of my own actually, but as I don’t live in London any more that’s unlikely to actually happen. My favourite thing to do though is to lie in wait and JUMP OUT on tours when they aren’t expecting it. That’s just about the MOST fun that you can have in alleyway.

I once asked a Ripper tour guide if he minded people springing out on them and he said that actually he liked it as it added a bit of a frisson of excitement to the whole thing. I took that as permission to continue. He also said, usefully, that the best time to go on a Ripper walk is the week of Bonfire night as there’s a good ambience going on.

That photograph was taken in one of the best alleyways ever, which is just off Artillery Lane in Whitechapel. It used to have this excellent piece of graffiti at the end but it appears to have gone now, which is very sad indeed.

Before I say adieu to this much edited shambles of a post, I would just like to share this photograph of my friend Sarah with you. This is not just any old pavement that she is lying on. No. This is in fact the very spot that the body of Catherine Eddowes was discovered on and thanks to some direction from me, Sarah is lying in an approximation of the exact same pose too. I love my friends.

So there we have it. I love alleyways and I don’t care who knows it. Probably.

Mary Jane Kelly, 9th November 1888

9 Nov

 

Several weeks had passed since the dreadful events of the 30th September when both Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes had met their dismal deaths at the hands of either two separate killers or the same deranged madman. Their murders had not been forgotten but after the first few weeks of fevered terror and speculation, a calm had fallen upon the streets of Whitechapel and people were beginning to go about their lives as normal again.

Since embarking on this series of posts marking the victims of Jack the Ripper, I’ve become more conscious of the passing of time as it must have seemed to the people of 1888 Spitalfields as the days lengthened into weeks and then into a whole month. They must have felt just about able to heave a collective sigh of relief that the ordeal was all over when the morning of the 9th November broke and everything fell apart again.

It was a clear, cold morning and I can imagine Thomas Bowyer, a lackey sent by the well known local landlord McCarthy to collect a rent arrears from a mean lodging in Miller’s Court breathing into his cupped hands to warm them and shielding his eyes against the low winter sun as he hurried along, the wet leaves slipping beneath his boots. It was 10.45 in the morning and the streets would have been buzzing with activity and excitement as the people of the East End, always up for a party, prepared for the Lord Mayor’s Show, which was due to take place later that day.

The young woman who lived in the room owed over six weeks rent, around 27 shillings, and McCarthy, who had been uncharacteristically lenient until now, was determined to collect. It’s not known why McCarthy was willing to let her go for so long without paying rent – the girl, who was known variously as Mary Anne, Mary Jane, Marie Jeanette, Emma or Lizzie depending, presumably, on who asked, was said to be of an attractive appearance with a fresh, clear complexion, thick auburn hair and with a friendly, good natured manner so it may be that her landlord had something of a soft spot for her.

Until quite recently she had not been living alone but her boyfriend, Joe, who had taken the room with her in the first place, had moved out after she had returned to prostitution against his wishes and had started allowing her friends to stay in their home. Joe had not entirely abandoned her though and still continued to visit and probably financially assist her to some degree.

Bowyer would have known all of this as Mary Jane was well known in the Dorset Street area of Whitechapel and was frequently to be seen standing outside the Ten Bells pub beside the ominous, looming Christ Church next door or walking the streets with her friends. The slum landlords of the East End weren’t charities though and the situation couldn’t be left to go on forever, no matter how kindly they felt towards the tenant.

The alleyway that led to Miller’s Court ran off the mean, notorious Dorset Street, which was known to be a local hot bed of crime and iniquity, a place so fearsome that the local police (including my ancestor, PS David Lee!) had to go in pairs when they were forced to go there, so terrifying and volatile were the inhabitants. Bowyer would have been well used to it thanks to his work for McCarthy but it still can’t have been a pleasant vicinity to visit and he would doubtless have hurried along, avoiding eye contact until he reached the archway that led down to Miller’s Court.

Mary Jane Kelly’s residence was number 13: a roughly twelve feet square room, meanly furnished with a pine bed, a couple of tables, some chairs and a wash stand. It wasn’t much but in comparison to many of her peers in Spitalfields, Mary Jane, a woman without proper means of supporting herself, an erratic lifestyle and a liking for gin was living in relative comfort.

Bowyer knocked on the door, then when there was no response, he went around to the windows that overlooked the water pump at the rear of the yard. One of the window panes had been broken for a while and either Mary Jane or Joe had effected a makeshift repair by shoving a piece of cloth into the gap. Bowyer poked this out then pulled aside the thin threadbare curtains, allowing the bright November sunlight to shimmer into the grubby bedsit.

What he saw when the gloom had dissipated enough for him to be able to see inside, must have terrified him and I can imagine him swiftly recoiling then scrubbing his eyes with his fingers before he turned and fled back to McCarthy to tell him that actually, he wouldn’t be getting his rent from Miss Kelly after all, not that day or any other day.

Take a look at this painting, ‘The Ninth of November 1888′ by William Logsdail, which depicts the Lord Mayor’s procession through the streets of London. Despite the glitz and splendour of the procession’s regalia, there is something very gloomy and menacing about this painting with the dark, wet streets, the sombre clothes of the crowd and the foreboding skies above.

It’s almost as though the artist wanted to evoke the fact that at 1.30pm only a few miles away, in a squalid, dank hovel in Whitechapel, the police, who had been loitering fearfully, waiting for both direction and a requested team of bloodhounds in the yard of Miller’s Court since their arrival just after 11am, had just broken into the room of Mary Kelly and were recoiling, their hands over their mouths as they encountered her body, lying splayed in a state of revolting, pitiful mutilation on her bed. While looking at the painting, you can almost sense the panicked, shocked whisper running through the ragged crowd – ‘There’s been another one in Spitalfields. A young Irish girl. She was left in pieces this time…’ while all the while the drums beat out a solemn, funereal rhythm as the Lord Mayor’s procession passes slowly by…

RIP Mary or whoever you were.

 

Don’t forget that I have a brilliant guest post about Mary Jane Kelly by writer Fiona Rule as well and I have another guest post coming soon by Christopher Scott, author of ‘Will The Real Mary Kelly…?‘

10 Things that I like: two: my favourite pub

30 Oct

Here is a picture of me holding a gin inside my favourite pub. I look happy don’t I? That’s because I am full of gin and also ensconced in one of my favourite places. They don’t know my name in my favourite pub – I go there too infrequently these days and also I’ve always felt a bit uneasy about the whole concept of being so well known in a drinking establishment that they hail you by name as soon as you walk in and immediately endeavour to hand you your ‘usual’.

Then again, I once spent a miserable summer working in a pub called The Durham Ox in Beeston, Nottingham where we were encouraged to try to remember customer’s names and usual drinks in a vain attempt to make the place seem more welcoming. This being a pub where one of the other bar maids performed a possibly unsanitory act on a customer in the loos. That’s pretty welcoming actually, now I come to think of it.

Anyway, moving speedily onwards as I don’t have all day and nor, I expect, do you. My favourite pub isn’t the one I worked at or indeed any of the ones that I used to frequent in Nottingham during my student days – The Angel, The Tap and Tumbler, The Trippe to Jerusalem, The Salutation, the weird one in Hockley with the horrible oxblood ceiling, the Rose and Crown on Derby Road and many others, I salute you. Different pubs may come and go over the years, but you never forget the ones that you went to as a student: tables sticky with spilled beer, overflowing ashtrays, the melancholy broken tunes of the fruit machine in the corner.

Here I am again in my favourite pub. I am not reponsible for the shaky camera work, just the shaky subject matter.

I didn’t come to my favourite pub until relatively late in life when I moved to London in my late twenties, somewhat bemused to find myself doing something that I had always said I would never ever do but which transpired to suit me better than anything else that I had ever done. I was lucky really – I already had a boyfriend of sorts, plenty of friends and a social life there so for me it was a bit like gatecrashing a party by walking in backwards while holding a drink, which at that time would have been a Pimms.

We came upon my favourite pub, the Princess Alice in Whitechapel which was then called The City Dart, quite by chance. My sort of boyfriend and I had gone on a Ripper walk with my friend Tish and her then boyfriend Mike, who is now her boyfriend again.

In fact, here is my Live Journal entry for that fateful night, 26th October 2002:

‘Saturday night finally went on Jack the Ripper walk with the delightful Tish and her suitor Mike. Was not very creepy at all but did occaionally get some sense of Victorian, gas light creepiness. Went to cool pub afterwards, which we intend making our local, but can’t remember what it was called sadly (The City Dart?). Anyway, sneaked off and had Bailey’s lattes, which are beyond yummy. Decided to forgo usual beer for rest of the evening and introduced Tish to the delights of Pimms. We are classy us. Giggled a lot and was a bit annoying. Oh well. I wanted to smoke but NAME REMOVED crushed my cigarette packet in front of me and started shouting so I ran into the loos for a bit of a cry with Tish.‘

Now, as you can probably imagine, there is a lot that I am not saying in this Live Journal post. We had had a great time on the Ripper Walk, except for the bits when NAME REMOVED who was holding my hand had taken to deliberately crushing my fingers whenever Tish and I started giggling. The pub was great though, really big and old fashioned and cosy. We all sat at a big round table at the back and had a lovely time until NAME REMOVED suddenly picked up my packet of cigarettes and crushed it before flinging the remnants all over the table.

Which was a bit awkward.

Gin and gin candle. This was ART to me at the time that I took this photograph. ART.

This should have put me off the City Dart, but no. I went back frequently, drawn in by its old school atmosphere, its mix of shiny faced city boys, the occasional Hoxton type and slightly scary gangster types and had some pretty epic nights out there as well including the one where I drank tequila shots with a total stranger because they’d never done them before and ended up crawling around on the floor and the one where I drunkenly bet Tish that I could pull any man I wanted and then did by sheer force of charm and having a low cut top.

That isn’t something I am proud of though. I think the guy in question actually really liked me and I was really horrible to him because, well there is no way to say this nicely so I will put it as baldly as I can, I had just been dumped two weeks before I was due to get married and so wasn’t really in a great place. He was nice to me though and I think of him whenever I am in there. I wonder if he thinks of me too.

Joolz Denby wrote a poem once (I am about to paraphrase horribly because I don’t actually remember how the poem goes) about how she thinks about past lovers and raises a glass of wine to them and concludes that someone out there is also raising a glass to her and wishing her well. I am not like that. That is not my life. If you are an ex lover and occasionally think ‘Oh, I hope she’s doing well, I raise my glass to her’ then do get in touch but in the meantime I’ll get on with observing the tumble weed roll relentlessly across my inbox, while the church bell tolls relentlessly overhead and in the distance a dog barks.

Moving on!

I’ve moved away from London now but I try to visit the City Dart whenever I go back, infinitely preferring it to the more well known Ten Bells just up the road. It’s changed a lot since those dark days of 2002 and has gone back to its original name: The Princess Alice as well as having a bit of a makeover so it is less like a slightly down at heel east end boozer and altogether more salubrious with big leather arm chairs and muted, some might say annoyingly so, lighting.

I still love it though. The last time I went in, I was with my friend Simon and had just taken him on a bit of a tour of the back alleys of Whitechapel after leaving the Blind Beggar. I showed him the spot where poor Martha Tabram was found stabbed in a doorway in 1888 and then we went round the corner and there was the Princess Alice waiting for us, its windows glowing amber in the darkness. I had a couple of gins, as usual and lounged on a sofa chatting about Dorian Grey, gin, TEAM JACK T shirts, ventriloquism and Victorian Prostitute re-enactment. It was a perfect evening.

So, ladies and gentlemen, I present unto you, the Princess Alice on Commercial Street in Whitechapel, my favourite pub in all the world; named after one of the worst disasters to affect Victorian London and a jewel of the east end.

Can’t wait to go back now! You should all come with me! We could all wear corsetry and drink Hendricks then go for a wander through some alleyways. It would be brilliant! Come on!

Whitechapel – episode one

12 Oct

So, what did you all think of last night’s first episode of Whitechapel? I found that it really stood up well to a repeat viewing (haha, how smug am I?!) and was just as gloomy, gruesome but shoot through with humanity and humour as I recalled. I love the relationship between DI Chandler (Rupert Penry-Jones) and DS Miles (Phil Davis) as their sympathy, admiration and understanding of each other continues to grow.

It was gory though wasn’t it? I must admit to having a limited knowledge of the Krays and had, in my naivety, imagined that they just roughed people up a bit. I mean, why else would every second person in the area (including an uncle – by marriage, I hasten to add) be so keen to claim that they knew them in some way? I had no idea that their behaviour was quite so vicious and unbalanced and it made for really uncomfortable viewing at times.

I may not totally understand it, but you can sort of see why people are so eager to be connected to them in some way as, horrible though they undoubtedly were (except to their mum as we are so often reminded), they are steeped in legend, a rather seedy sort of glamour and are also absolutely intertwined with the history of the East End. And it is the threads of all of this that Whitechapel skillfully pulls together to create a sinister, paranoid world of murder, corruption and menace.

Rupert Penry-Jones has his own take on the Kray’s popularity: ‘I was fascinated by the Krays and what I found so fascinating is that they were minor celebrities and it became cool to hang out with them.  Having said that, most people were scared of the Krays, so they would try and make them their friends rather than have them as enemies.’ Which is, of course, totally understandable!

Detective Superintendant Leonard ‘Nipper’ Read, who eventually brought the real Kray twins to justice also points out that ‘East End people were very reluctant to say anything as they saw the Krays as part of their lives but also one of the reasons they didn’t talk is because they didn’t trust the police’. He also says that the people of the area believed that the local streets were safer because of the Krays and the tight hold they had on the underworld of the East End.

‘People would be introduced to them and never believe what they were.  They were an exception and didn’t give a particularly bad impression.  They were well presented and dressed and lived in two very different worlds and enjoyed both.’

‘However they could turn on a sixpence and even their own gang members were afraid of them.’

The references to ‘the legend of the Krays’ may strike one as rather silly at first, but then you recall sitting next to old men in Whitechapel boozers, all keen to tell their tales of the time they bumped into Ronnie or one of their friends drove a car for Reggie or they were in the Blind Beggar on the night that George Cornell got shot and you realise that this is how legends are born.

One of the things that I like best about Whitechapel is the use of location to add to both authenticity and also atmosphere. Although the heart was bombed out of the Spitalfields area during the Blitz, I don’t think there are many more evocative areas in London and this must surely be a gift for the production team because as Sally Woodward Gentle points out: ‘Once again the streets of Whitechapel yield an extraordinary story‘.

For me, the streets of Whitechapel are as much the stars of the show as the actors and plot so I am always looking out for the familiar alleyways, cobbled streets and quirky backstreet pubs that I know and love so much.

The filming of Whitechapel looks to have been a huge and complex undertaking, with the crew shooting in over 80 locations over the course of 39 days. They dealt with this by having a main ‘hero’ location and then moving briefly out for odd little quick segments.

Filming locations used for the production included the Repton Boxing Club where the original twins used to spar, Pellici’s Cafe where they liked to have breakfast and, of course, the Blind Beggar on Whitechapel Road. As Rupert Penry-Jones explains: ‘We are using Whitechapel in a similar manner to the way we used it before, the difference is now we are using locations that echo the 1960s, rather than echoing the Victorian era. You’ve got all these fabulous buildings and we filmed as much as possible in locations that were frequented by Ronnie and Reggie.’

Anyway, having affectively spoilered myself for episodes two and three, I can assure you all that the rest of the series is really fantastic and there are rocky, troubling, disturbing times still to come for Chandler and his team as they delve deeper into the myths of the Krays and Whitechapel.

Whitechapel is on again next Monday on ITV1 from 9pm.

 

If you fancy watching a great video of the premiere that I attended last week then step this way! See if you can spot me in the audience!

Gin, no whores and the Whitechapel premiere

8 Oct

I feel rather unwell today. Am not hung over, just tired, you understand.

Anyway, as I MAY have mentioned on my blog last week, I got put on the guestlist for the premiere of the ITV crime drama series Whitechapel, which is due to start screening on ITV1 on Monday at 9pm and full of excitement and clutching my fabulous new Iron Fist Werewolf bag to my bosom, I headed off yesterday to attend!

My friend Simon and I started off the evening in the White Hart on Whitechapel High Street, where we enjoyed a gin before walking down Mile End Road to the Genesis Cinema where a winding queue of people proclaimed that something exciting was afoot.

On being ushered in and then excitingly waved past the queue due to being An Important Blogger (I’m not really an important blogger, I just wrote that to see what it is like) we then walked past a fake crime scene complete with white suited forensics person, body bag and all manner of gruesome apparatus to find ourselves in a room full of people milling around a probably authentic looking crime desk and with an attending female policewoman to direct us.

Clutching our drinks, Simon and I headed into the cinema where they had thoughtfully provided free popcorn for us all and there we waited, while images of Whitechapel, the Krays and premiere attendees were shown on the screen and a rather cool looking DJ played 60s hits by, I am informed, people like The Kinks.

There was some fun when I was checking Twitter and saw the lovely WaterAndInk on my timeline say ‘Think I’ve just spotted you at the premiere’ which led to much excitement and waving!

We then settled down when a Krays expert came onstage to give a brief talk about the Krays, his book about them and his upcoming auction of Krays memorabilia. After which the executive producer Sally Woodward Gentle came up to introduce the snippet we were about to see, which was a special one and a half hour long edit of the start of the series.

It started off with the same melancholic music as Whitechapel and slick opening credits with hints of blue and sepia before opening on a police award ceremony at which it soon becomes clear that things are not exactly rosy for DI Chandler (yummy Rupert Penry-Jones) and his team.

Peter Serafinowicz is in this series playing a rival DI with hidden, dark depths. He really was exceptionally good and really chilling in places, provoking genuine shock in one scene in particular. I actually Tweeted him from the premiere to tell him that we were watching and how great he was and got what I think was a pleased reply by DM, which was nice to find on my phone in the morning when I er awoke from my perfectly sober slumbers.

Whitechapel itself was enormous fun, extremely droll in places, grotesque in others but always supremely entertaining. The script was fast paced, the acting intense and the overall ambience dark, threatening and suspenseful.

I don’t know much about the Krays (they’re a bit after ‘my’ period) but I suspect that the crime scenes were pretty authentic and suitably grotesque. I would say that it was slightly less gory than its predecessor series about a Jack the Ripper copycat, but there was blood and gore aplenty, if you like that sort of thing.

Without giving anything away, I wasn’t sure about the theme of the plot and it wasn’t always totally convincing but suspension of belief aside, it was astutely dealt with and the air of menace and paranoia was skillfully heightened throughout until the chilling and genuinely Edge Of Seat climax, which left me desperately wanting to know what happened next!

Steve Pemberton deserves a mention for his repeat portrayal of crime enthusiast and Ripperologist Buchan. His documentary about the Kray murders is genuinely hilarious and he once again turns in a performance that is both amusing and also oddly touching. Rupert Penry-Jones was fabulous too – reprising the quiet, precise almost neurotic character of Chandler but this time revealing a hint of dangerous steel beneath his well mannered, public school boy exterior.

In summary, this series of Whitechapel has at its heart the same aesthetics, themes and sinister brooding atmosphere of the original but at the same time it is very different as it evokes a real sense of the murderous paranoia of sixties London rather than the squalid Victoriana of last time. It’s definitely a must see on Monday evening.

I’d really love it if they made a third series – I passed on a suggestion to the production team that they could maybe base it on the Ratcliff Highway Murders of 1811, which I think would make for a really chilling and gripping series. We’ll have to wait and see though!

Sadly, I didn’t get to annoy Rupert Penry-Jones, although we spotted him in the cinema, as he is filming at the moment and had to rush back but we chatted to a few people after the lights came up and larked around the crime scene. I was asked to briefly review the opener on camera, but am suspecting that my performance won’t see the light of day!

After all this excitement, there was only one thing to do and that was head to the Blind Beggar, which we had just seen on screen as the scene of one of the Krays’ most notorious killings. I’d never been there before and really liked it – there’s a nice beer garden at the side, where we drank gin and chatted to people.

We then headed up the alleyway where Martha Tabram was discovered murdered in 1888 and went to the Princess Alice, my favourite pub, which has had another make over. Here we drank yet more gin and discussed huge and exciting plans for Gin and Whores. After this, things became a bit hazy but the Ten Bells, a curry house and the site of Millers Court were all visited as well.

I like to tell people that getting drunk on gin then wandering around Whitechapel at night is a very important part of the research for my book and to be honest, that is pretty much true. Yes, I see you looking disbelieving but I find the area itself hugely inspiring and it never fails to trigger all sorts of intriguing possibilities for my writing. It helps of course that I have a close personal link to the area thanks to my great grandfather being involved in the Cable Street Battle and so on.

Sadly, I forgot to take a note of the house on Commercial Street that my Jack the Ripper chasing great great great grandfather, David Lee lived in when he was an 1888 precursor to Whitechapel’s DI Chandler but will make sure I look for it next time!

Anyway, thanks so much to the publicity team for Whitechapel for letting me go to their fabulous premiere, the team behind Whitechapel for making such a great show, Simon for being, once again, the host with the er most and also the lovely people and Twitterers that I met last night. Not that we Twitterers aren’t people too, but you know what I mean.

You can find out more about Whitechapel here. It starts on Monday night at 9pm and is really rather good!

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