I should know better than to get my hopes up about a Five documentary. Ok, so the presence of former Sun editor Kelvin MacKenzie suggested there may well be a sensationalist tinge to Jack the Ripper: Tabloid Killer, but without a two-tonne mom or cop-with-a-camera in sight there was room for optimism. This soon ebbed away as MacKenzie boorishly promised to nail the "crooked journalist at the heart of the Ripper legend", whose boss apparently told a few porkies to up sales of his newly launched paper, The Star. For the rest of the programme I was somehow unable to shake from my mind images of pots and kettles...

MacKenzie flitted between overt admiration for the skills of Star editor TP O'Connor, at one point even likening the man's "genius" to his own, to classic Sun outrage at his fabrication of facts. Fuelling this outrage was the assertion that O'Connor was not only responsible for deliberately whipping up hysteria over the Ripper murders, but that he was also behind one of his minions faking the letter that coined the name Jack the Ripper. From this we are invited to conclude that O'Connor might as well have done the dirty deeds himself.

The over-reliance on conjecture and tendency to lapse into massaging MacKenzie's ego detracted from what was prime documentary material. Was it really necessary to demonstrate how much better a MacKenzie-designed front page covering the Ripper murders would have been? And what did we actually learn from the forensic pathologist as he scribbled over the body of a life model (surely Resusci Anne could have been drafted in instead)? Of course, I'm missing the point: this is former Sun editor Kelvin MacKenzie in a documentary on Five. What am I thinking...

Ultimately, Jack the Ripper: Tabloid Killer was a living, breathing illustration of the sensationalist coverage it was at once condemning and heralding. Perhaps MacKenzie should try appraising some of his own multi-million selling front pages (frequently referred to) from the vantage point of his newly found moral high ground.