TV's face of the Ripper

DICK HOLLAND'S paunch is fighting for space inside the confines of his sports jacket.

"I'm a blunt Yorkshireman," he says. "That much they've got right."

The former Detective Superintendent is sipping coffee inside a television preview theatre in Leeds, looking at a reflection of himself 25 years earlier.

"Obviously, they've gone for character rather than physical similarity," he muses.

Holland has been retired 17 years now, and, despite his girth, looks well on it. He quit the force at 50 when they put him back in uniform and packed him off to Sowerby Bridge.

"It was the ****hole of hell," he reflects, bluntly. "And when things weren't going well, it was a pile on the ****hole of hell."

His enforced penance followed the widespread condemnation of the inquiry he had helped to run: the five-year manhunt for the Yorkshire Ripper. That is what has now fuelled the interest of the TV company that is his host this afternoon.

Granada has turned the investigation into a four-hour drama called This Is Personal, the first half of which will be screened this week. It is the first time that actors, rather than old news clips, have been used to tell the story.

Peter Sutcliffe, the Bradford lorry driver eventually convicted of 13 murders and seven attempted murders, figures only marginally, his shadow occasionally decorating the edge of the screen as he flees from the scene of his crimes.

Dick Holland, on the other hand, takes centre stage.

He and his boss, the late Assistant Chief Constable George Oldfield, give the narrative its main focus, as they buckle under the weight of their own paperwork, become obsessed with the correspondence of a notorious Geordie hoaxer, and allow their petty rivalries with other detectives to flare into internecine warfare.

"There's been a lot of Press misunderstanding and misrepresentation about this," says Holland. But, blunt Yorkshireman that he is, he cannot stop himself adding: "It was, quite frankly, a c*ck-up.

"Why we finished up with four separate files on Sutcliffe, I'll never know."

He falls silent and reflects on the scale of his mistake as, on the screen, his character scrawls the word "File" on Sutcliffe's paperwork and consigns it to an inactive out-basket.

Richard Ridings, an actor familiar from guest-parts in Heartbeat and Pie in the Sky, impersonates Holland for the camera. Despite the ex-detective's insistence to the contrary, there is a notable physical resemblance: both are thinning on top and hemispheric below.

"Richard went to the same school as me, Huddersfield College, and he played the same position on the rugby field," says Holland. "But that's not surprising because with our build, you can''t do 'owt else but prop."

Oldfield is played by Alun Armstrong, a well-known character actor who looks nothing at all like the former chief.

"I watched footage of him and I got to know how the man behaved," he says. "I'm a Geordie and I remember how I felt when those infamous tapes were released. Every Geordie became a suspect."

The film, a chronological and precise dramatisation concentrating on known events rather than interpretation or characterisation, opens in 1981 at the time of Sutcliffe's arrest, then flashes back to the scene of his earliest crimes.

It was shot mostly in Leeds and Bradford, though not always at the authentic locations. Neither Leeds City Council (who feared the city would be seen in a bad light) nor West Yorkshire Police would let Granada on their premises, so substitute buildings had to be found.

Later, when the police asked to see a preview of the film, the TV company was mutually non-co-operative.

A "double" also had to be found for Sutcliffe's house. Permission could not be obtained to use the original, in Garden Lane, Heaton, so the film makers repaired instead to Otley Road, Leeds.

Sutcliffe's wife Sonia, portrayed on screen by Claire Webzell, was kept out of the research process.

"We made no contact with Sonia," says producer Mike Dormer.

Sutcliffe, whose face is seen only in the film's last few scenes, is played by Craig Cheetham, a Manchester actor who at the time of filming had never appeared on TV, but who has since made episodes of Heartbeat and Granada's hospital drama, Always and Everyone.

"The Yorkshire Ripper is not the most auspicious role in which to make your TV debut," admits Dormer. George Oldfield's widow, Margaret, granted the film-makers "limited co-operation" and maintained cordial relations with them.

But Ronald Gregory, West Yorkshire Chief Constable during the Ripper years, has stayed silent since selling his memoirs to a national newspaper in the early Eighties.

Dormer, meanwhile, acknowledges the anomaly of ITV's scheduling of the drama, just a few months after the same network's major documentary on the Ripper.

"But it's a generation later, and the documentary got audiences of eight million," he says.

"You can't deny the incredible amount of interest the subject still holds."

'I'm the other one you nearly killed'

History has not been kind to Dick Holland or George Oldfield in its assessment of the Ripper inquiry. And neither has Granada's dramatist, Neil McKay.

The police, in his evaluation, are as subtle as a sack of coal, not just with their suspects but also with the victims and their families.

"Was she a pro?" asks one detective, as, on the screen, a woman lies dead.

Almost the only character displaying genuine humanity is Doreen Hill, the distraught mother of the Ripper's last victim, Jacqueline. She thought the police were a bunch of idiots, and told them so.

Nevertheless, as Oldfield's health starts to suffer, McKay's script perpetrates the widely-held view that despite his shortcomings, the policeman was actually another of Sutcliffe's victims.

"Do you know who I am?" he asks Sutcliffe upon his eventual capture.

"No."

"I'm the other bugger you nearly killed."

"Oldfield wasn't a saint by any means," says McKay, "but he was a decent man who was trying to do something almost impossible: catch the Ripper.

"He carried the weight and the expectations of the whole of the north of England on his shoulders.

"A flawed man he may have been, but who would have done better in his place?"

McKay spent a year researching the background to the events.

"We knew it was a very sensitive subject and we went to the greatest lengths we could not to exploit the story, but to look at those parts of it that are of legitimate public interest.

"Peter Sutcliffe's own story we wouldn't have touched with a barge pole."

Actor who played the Panther

This week's drama is the first to be based on the Yorkshire Ripper. But 22 years ago, Bradford's second most notorious serial killer was also being impersonated by an actor.

Donald Neilson, the ex-soldier who in 1975 kidnapped and then murdered 17-year-old heiress Lesley Whittle, was the subject of a little-seen feature film named after his swaggering other self, The Black Panther.

Donald Sumpter, a highly regarded character actor now, was seen as the fanatical Neilson, plotting what he considered to be the perfect crime, inside a den at his terrace house in Thornbury.

His plan was to extort £50,000 from Miss Whittle's wealthy Midlands family.

By the time he broke into her bedroom like a cat burglar, he had already murdered three sub-postmasters, one of them in Harrogate, and shot and killed a night watchman. There was outrage when plans emerged to turn Neilson's story into an X-certificate film, especially so soon after his capture and conviction.

The movie was set for a Boxing Day release in 1977, but in the days before multi-screen cinemas, there were few takers.

It surfaced a few years later and gained currency as an early "video nasty", even though it contained no explicit violence.

The film concentrated on Neilson himself and reconstructed each of his crimes in meticulous detail.

But there was no dramatic subtext, and horror writer Michael Armstrong's script offered little insight into the mind of a killer who claimed to harbour a grudge against society.

Donald Sumpter went on to acclaim in such major TV productions as Great Expectations and Our Friends in the North.

Neilson, meanwhile, is serving the balance of his life sentence at Full Sutton prison, York. He is 63 now. No one expects him ever to be set free.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.