Cracker

If you had to choose one ITV-made psychological thriller series from the Nineties for a desert island, what would it be?

Some may plump for Prime Suspect but for many, Cracker wins hands down - not least because of its star.

Robbie Coltrane has always been good value for money in comedy roles, but as the criminal psychologist Eddie Fitzgerald, he shone brighter than most stars of his generation.

Scripts by Jimmy McGovern (among others) did no harm and with a knockout supporting cast including Barbara Flynn, Lorcan Cranitch and Christopher Eccleston, it was little wonder the show won a string of awards.

When the Americans decided to remake the show almost word for word with Robert Pastorelli in the lead, it was a pretty fruitless attempt to sell a great series to a wider audience.

Although not bad, the star was lighter in more ways than one and the whole thing gave many fans a nagging sense of deja vu.

It's impossible to overstate how classy this programme is. The cast are uniformly superb, Jimmy Mc Govern's writing is by times disturbing and violent, by times deeply compassionate, and the overall tone of the piece is dark and moody, but with just enough ascerbic humour to lighten the weight.

Coltrane is excellent here, but he's spoiled also; he's been given one of the best-written roles in TV history, but he portrays Fitz with effortless panache. No easy thing given the complexity of the character. He's an almost supernaturally gifted psychologist, but he can't understand his wife and son; he's capable of real understanding and compassion, but is an inveterate user of people despite himself.

The supporting cast are excellent, and those actors brought in to play "villains of the week" almost always hold their own. You'll cry when, at the end of "To Say I Love You", the young stutterer realises he'll never be able to say the things to his girlfriend that he wants to say. Robert Carlyle's Albie in "To Be Somebody" is one of the standout characters of the entire series. Fitz's final chat with the put-upon Catholic housewife in "Brotherly Love" is truly disturbing, but heartbreaking too. You'll feel for each of these characters, which is an amazing feat by all concerned in the making, considering their crimes are so graphically portrayed, and the show is so unflinching about revealing the kinds of effects violent crime has on survivors, and the families of the victims. This is classy television.

It's not without it's faults, of course. The standard does tend to take a nose-dive when Jimmy Mc Govern's not writing (not by much, sometimes, but always perceptibly) and the quite graphic nature of most of the episodes means this won't be to everyone's taste, but these are small flaws. This is wonderful stuff. It's impossible to overstate this fact, so i'll say it again: this is really classy television.

We've had the whodunnit and even the howdunnit but Cracker is something else - its the definitive whydunnit, a superb cocktail of wit,grit and human frailty, perfectly pitched and performed - in short: It's marvellous. If you've never seen it (and this is something you should rectify immediately) the 'cracker' of the title is no less than 19 stone of chain smoking, hard drinking, gambling addicted psychologist whose skills become invaluable to the Manchester police. This set up is established in the opening story 'the mad woman in the attic' in which Fitz (Coltrane) offer's his help to the police when one of his students becomes the latest victim of brutal murderer. The train based killing set-up is based on a real murder that took place on route to London in the early 90's and it's this borrowing from the headlines that gives the series it's sense of reality, often making for uncomfortable viewing. McGovern's character's are never allowed to stand still - they have real emotional and psychological density and the fallout from events in one story (and they're are many particularly in the first two series) are carried through into the next. Fitz is perversely selfish and flawed but is also in possession of penetrative intellect and cutting wit which makes both his domestic scenes in which he attempts to reconcile himself with the wishes of his long suffering wife Judith and the inevitable showdowns with his criminal adversaries equally captivating. It's the later you look forward to the most but there's also a terrific supporting cast to enjoy including Christopher Eccleston, Geraldine Sommrevile and the superb Ricky Tomlinson. It would be unfair to new viewers to spoil the intricate layers of each story by going into them too deeply, simply to say that Cracker was and is occasionally gruelling, always challenging television, the uniquely British sensibility of which lends it a weight (no pun on Robbie Coltrane intended) that would be impossible to replicate elsewhere. McGovern, if you had to lay one criticism at his door, tends to underwrite or caricature middle class characters but when writing about what he knows he's unbeatable. Those Cracker stories not penned by him tend not to have quite as much impact though Ted Whitehead's the Big Crunch has some memorable exchanges between Fitz and arrogant sect leader Kenneth Trant but Paul Abbot's stories, though good, aren't a patch on McGovern's best perhaps betraying his relative lack of experience in the genre at the time. This is all mere nick-picking though; Cracker is superb stuff and if you don't think so then you genuinely need to see a psychologist.

I stumbled onto "Cracker" knowing nothing about it nor Robbie Coltrane. After getting into the series, I felt as if I'd died and gone to heaven. Previous writers have written very well about the brilliance of Robbie Coltrane's acting and Jimmy McGovern's writing. "Cracker" and so many other well-directed, -acted, -written British detective series beg the question: Why is Hollywood incapable of this stuff? With few exceptions, the U.S. film industry fails and fails so miserably. Except for the folks at HBO and the Boston PBS affiliate WGBH in collaboration with like-minded professionals in the U.K., "the suits" of the American film industry seem unwilling to gamble on a series like (the British version of) "Cracker." I also highly recommend "Foyle's War," "Touching Evil," and "Second Sight" if you're a fan of brilliant British detective series. "Prime Suspect" remains on my list to watch among some others, all British. I am forever thankful these are all available on DVD.

The "Cracker" series was one of the best television series ever. The screenplays, directing, acting, and cinematography were on par with the best crime movies of the past 50 years. The entire series is now available on DVD. The three seasons are divided into three 3 hour Dvds each. That's a lot of "Fitz", almost 27 hours, but you long for more when you are done! With these dvds, you get the uncensored version whose continuity is not broken up by commercial breaks. This adds quite a bit to the enjoyment of the series. I haven't been a big fan of British TV melodramas because I found them a bit slow paced, but not so with the "Cracker" series. In summary, I have seen little on TV to compare to this series.