“It’s contrary to Godley’s nature,” says Coltrane, a familiar face to British televiewers but probably best-known around the world for playing the larger-than-life Russian entrepreneur Valentin Zukovsky in the two most recent James Bond movies. “But he accepts Abberline’s visions as genuine and feels compelled to act on them.”

What marks this version of the story off from other big and small-screen versions of the Ripper legend is the focus on the struggles of the Whitechapel prostitutes who are the killer’s victims. “Previous accounts of this story have been antiseptic, told from the eyes of the prim upper class,” says Allen Hughes. “We’re revealing it from the perspective of the people who lived in squalor in the neighbourhood where this terror was inflicted.”

Foremost among these is Mary Kelly, an Irish-born streetwalker who yearns to return to the innocence of her childhood, and who forms an allegiance with Abberline, in whom she recognises a kindred spirit. Her life is the flip-side of the growing prosperity of Victorian London - one of the women whose very existence has been turned into a commodity which has so little intrinsic value that it was relatively easy for the authorities to hush up their killings.

“My character and her friends live on the edge of starvation in this horrible slum. Each day is a struggle, and having a place to sleep is a luxury,” says Heather Graham, who won the role of Mary despite the Hughes’ original intention that the role should be played by an unknown English actress. “When Heather walked in the room, there was something about her that made you want to save her,” says executive producer Amy Robinson. “I think the brothers were looking for that in Mary Kelly - someone who has not hardened and who made you feel, ‘We’ve got to get this girl out of Whitechapel. We don’t want her to die.’”

Heather Graham as Mary Kelly. the Irish-born prostitute who yearns for the innocence of her youth.

Less lucky are Mary’s friends, played by Lesley Sharp, Susan Lynch, Katrin Cartlidge and Annabelle Apsion, with each actress being fitted with ever more ghastly prosthetics as the Hughes brothers strove for their usual graphic realism. For Cartlidge, this was a doubly unpleasant experience. Not only were the completed special effects so horrible that she couldn’t look at herself in the mirror: it also completely ruined her first meeting with Johnny Depp.

“I’m lying dead on the ground and he’s leaning down into my face to smell my breath,” says the actress who has worked with such leading European directors as Mike Leigh and Lars von Trier. “And I’m thinking, ‘He’s looking at the ugliest thing he’s ever seen! I have a slit throat and entrails over my shoulder and three flies walking on my face. This is not the way I wanted to meet Johnny Depp!”

But the extremely graphic nature of the killings is the other side of the coin to the exploration of the lives of those who fell victim to the Ripper in From Hell (the title comes from a ‘return address’ the Ripper put on one of his notes).

“The victims of Jack the Ripper have never been humanised,” declares Allen Hughes. “We wanted to give them life. They weren’t just casualties: they were human beings.”