RIPPER STREET, BBC2, 9pm
AFTER Drake’s horrible death in the last series, this fifth and final one starts with a good old Victorian funeral scene. No-one celebrated death quite like them.
While “every uniform in London” will be at the grave site, Drake’s surviving friends, now on the run, can buy some free time to creep around in the sewers as they try to snare his killer. Then we’re thrown into yet more ghastly, candlelit horrors, with some vicious dog-fighting and reports of a man who “chewed his own tongue to ribbons” in a frenzy of dehydration.
Dramas portray the Victorians as either frenzied, mud-smeared maniacs or genteel, repressed toffs. Might there be room for a realistic Victorian period drama? I’d certainly watch it.
HORIZON: 10 THINGS YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THE FUTURE, BBC IPLAYER, 8pm
FORGET asking what the weather might be like tomorrow. Instead, this programme asks the 10 most crucial questions about your future, and it has nothing to do with drizzle.
Years ago, Arthur C Clarke predicted we would “solve the servant problem with the help of the monkey kingdom” but he then warned monkeys might start forming little trade unions.
Clearly it’s hard to predict the future, so Horizon avoids similar monkey business here by pinning everything to scientific advances which are already occurring, and by using existing data.
They ask questions such as how we might prolong our lifespan, taking the long-lived naked mole-rat as an example.
They also ask how AI could change the way we work; how gene therapy might be used to “hack” the immune system and wipe out cancer; and what climate change, cyborgs and flying cars could do to our humdrum daily lives.
You’ll either find this fascinating or downright frightening.
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