'Ridley Road': Episode 1 Recap

Although it’s less than twenty years after the end of World War II when Ridley Road opens, neo-Nazism is still alive and thriving under the auspices of the National Socialist Movement in the United Kingdom, targeting Jews, Black, and brown people in the alleged interests of racial purity. Its headquarters are on London's Ridley Road itself, in the heart of the Jewish community.

Screenwriter Sarah Solemani and director Lisa Mulcahy bring Jo Bloom’s novel of the same name to life and present a vivid picture of life in East London in the early 1960s. Its story may be set geographically close to Call the Midwife, but this drama does not deliver hope as that series does. It’s not yet the swinging sixties and in this crowded, bustling area in the heart of Jewish London, there are still visible bomb sites, and massive rebuilding is underway to provide for a growing multicultural population. In the street markets, and aboard crowded red buses, Cockney slang is packed with Yiddish words. It’s all brought to life with newsreel footage from the period blended into the dramatic action.

But the beginning of the first episode isn’t quite what you’d expect. We’re at a magnificent Georgian country house where a young blond woman and a small boy romp together, straightening out bedclothes and singing nonsense songs. And then Daddy arrives, full of smiles, and the three of them formally start their day with a Nazi salute. The father is Colin Jordan (Rory Kinnear) and the young woman is Jane Carpenter, who we next meet as the very brunette—and very Jewish—Vivien Epstein (Agnes O'Casey) with her family in Manchester at Sabbath dinner.