Red Riding: In The Year Of Our Lord 1974 (2009)

In 1974, Eddie Dunford, comes home from South England and gets a job as a cub reporter for the Yorkshire Post. A schoolgirl has gone missing, and Eddie suspects it's one of several crimes dating back six years; the police think not and blame gypsies. Eddie digs; the police stonewall him then two of them beat him after he visits the widowed mother of one of the girls missing for a few years. When a child's body turns up at a construction site of local building magnate John Dawson, Eddie has another thread to pull. By now, he's begun an affair with Paula, the widowed mom, and he suspects collusion among Dawson, the police, and his newspaper - but what are they covering up?

Director: Julian Jarrold (1974), James Marsh (1980), Anand Tucker (1983)
Starring: Mark Addy, Sean Bean, Jim Carter, Warren Clarke, Paddy Considine, Shaun Dooley, Gerard Kearns, Andrew Garfield, Rebecca Hall, Sean Harris, David Morrissey, Peter Mullan, Maxine Peake, Lesley Sharp, Robert Sheehan

Red Riding is a television adaptation of English author David Peace's Red Riding Quartet. Published between 1999 and 2002, the quartet comprises the novels Nineteen Seventy-Four (1999), Nineteen Seventy-Seven (2000), Nineteen Eighty (2001) and Nineteen Eighty-Three (2002). Set against a backdrop of serial murders, including the Yorkshire Ripper case, they deal with multi-layered corruption and feature several recurring characters across the four books. Though real crimes are featured the scripts are fictionalised and dramatised versions of events rather than contemporary factual accounts…

The Red Riding Trilogy follows controversial stories revolving around the manhunt for the brutal Yorkshire Ripper. After a failed attempt to crack Fleet Street, a cynical journalist returns to his homeland of Yorkshire and finds himself assigned to report on the case of a local girl who has gone missing. But after her bizarrely mutilated body is discovered, he is thrown into a sleaze infested, nightmarish world of corruption. As the killer's identity remains a mystery, savage events spiral out of control, spanning generations and leading to a shocking climax.