A new Yorkshire Ripper series shows our appetite for true crime — but is it unhealthy?

For me, it’s one of life’s big questions: why do people like true crime so much? I ask myself this often, alongside other conundrums, such as: are bay leaves a scam? And, what is the correct way to pronounce “almond”? Because people don’t just like true crime. People LOVE true crime. So much so that ITV has just commissioned a big new drama about the Yorkshire Ripper, aka that guy who killed 13 women and tried to kill seven more. Since everything is on fire, it almost seems the natural law of the universe that somebody, somewhere would be making a fancy telly show about a tragic loser like this.

The Yorkshire Ripper series will be “sensitively dramatised” of course, which is code for “this is NOT unethical”. We’re told that the show will be “placing the victims, their families and the survivors at the heart of this story”, which sounds sincere, but going by the two previous iterations of this formula, only time will tell whether they’ll be more than sketchy marginal figures.

Because, yes, if another ITV drama about a narcissist who likes to sadistically murder people is giving you a sense of déjà vu, that’s because the channel has done two this very year. There was White House Farm, where Freddie Fox played Jeremy Bamber, a man who killed his parents, sister and her children and then cried at their funeral. And more recently there was Des, where David Tennant wore a football scarf and looked sad as Dennis Nilsen, a role that largely required him to talk in monotone about boiling people’s heads and flushing them down the loo. The Ripper drama will be made by the same team — and hey, fair enough. They’re giving the people want they want: unsavoury characters played by thespian men who go to the Bafta awards.

It’s savvy for ITV to stake a claim on the true crime market, which has grown from some dodgy books on Amazon to a place proliferating at speed, thanks to some mannered American podcasters and endless provisions from Netflix. The recent documentary American Murder: The Family Next Door is one of the most unpalatable things on the platform: it has been watched, so far, by 52 million households. I’ve watched it, you probably have too. (But GOD, I wish I hadn’t.)

The appetite for the genre is gargantuan. It’s too basic to assume it’s all just cheap voyeurism. Instead it strikes me that there might be a deep human need to understand what would drive another person to commit these acts. We want to see the machinations of minds compelled to carry out unfathomable crimes to try to make some kind of sense out of them. But the more true crime I watch, the more misguided this seems. The hidden secret is nothing more than this: murderers are boring. They are not complicated, misunderstood, romantic masterminds. They are unpleasant, uninteresting people who take and ruin lives.

Does this mean we shouldn’t tell these stories at all? I don’t think so. When time has passed, the feeding frenzy of tabloid sensationalism is over, using storytelling to do justice to those who suffered can be powerful — but few have truly done this well. Hallie Rubenhold’s book The Five resurrected the women murdered by Jack the Ripper — it was all grace, no violence, but still compulsive reading. And the National Theatre’s London Road broke new ground by taking verbatim interviews of the community affected by the 2006 Ipswich murders and turning them into music, poignantly placing the everyday against the horror. There’s a common theme: the killer is expendable — not those he killed.