BBC One's Ripper Street is set in grisly Victorian London in a neighbourhood disenchanted with the police force following the Ripper murders. While it feels slightly ridiculous stating that there's ample gore in a programme called Ripper Street, a recent review in the Daily Mail seemed to suggest that some kind of trigger-warning is necessary. So yes, there’s a lot of gore and it’s dealt with head-on. If you’re looking for a Downton Abbey-lite to tide you over, Ripper Street’s probably not for you.

While I’ve never been a fan of horror or gore, this show’s got me hooked. The writing is tight and stylish, and the cast deliver convincing, dynamic performances, particularly the three leads. The broody Inspector Reid (Matthew Macfadyen) and his mysterious companions, Jackson (Adam Rothenberg) and Drake (Jerome Flynn) are each ‘hiding something’, and the clues we’ve been given thus far are entirely bemusing. We’re closest to learning the truth behind Reid’s burn-marks and his lost daughter, although there seems to be little headway in discovering just why Jackson’s in cahoots with ‘Long Susan’ (MyAnna Buring), ringleader of the local brothel, or, most puzzling of all, why Drake has a tattoo of an Egyptian god on his forearm.

The style is larger than life. The first episode comes across as a hybrid of Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes and BBC’s Sherlock, with some CSI thrown in for good measure. But whilst it feels familiar, the plot of each episode has taken me by surprise. In many ways, it’s reminiscent of House, in that whoever they think has ‘dunnit’ is always someone else. Last episode, the show opened with the news of an outbreak of cholera. It soon becomes clear that it’s not cholera and I’ll be the first to admit that I would never have suspected Mr Evil Moustache, in the granary mill, with the biochemical warfare. One of the few pitfalls so far has been that we’ve had three ‘just-in-the-nick-of-time’ solutions: here’s hoping that next week, Warlow manages to subvert our expectations.

The show doesn’t shy away from tackling grim themes: the policemen are not the ‘goodies’ in the conventional sense. There’s police brutality from Reid and coarse language and thinking from Drake, without even mentioning Jackson’s strained and often abusive relationship with Buring’s character. Yet this comes across true to life and an ‘anti-woman orgy of gore’ it is not. In fact, it seems more than a little unlikely when Emily Reid, the police inspector’s long-suffering wife, manages to entirely change the mind of the puritannical Mrs Gable (who goes as far as to say she ‘celebrated’ the punishment of Jack the Ripper) to such an extent that she offers to fund a shelter for women on the streets. Nonetheless, the show is never boring: even if you’re watching from between your fingers, I’d recommend giving it a try.