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.

It's now impossible to imagine anyone other than Robbie Coltrane as the rather eccentric psychologist Fitz. With his comedy background, Coltrane provided sporadic humorous moments throughout an otherwise bleak but compelling show. The supporting cast were great too, particularly Somerville and Eccleston. Jimmy McGovern's absence can be felt around the third series, (especially in Best Boys, though it's still a good piece of TV in its own right) but along with all previous series of the show, maintains the right pacing and excellent performances. I may have only discovered this show within the last number of years, but I have no regrets. It was bold, unique, even controversial at times, but all the better for it. Cracker rightly holds its place as a classic in television history. They don't make them like they used to.

In my opinion, the little I've seen of the American version of Cracker was actually a noble effort, but the crucial difference between the two was the presence of Robbie Coltrane.

Coltrane is one of the world's best actors. He fills the character of Fitz so well that this unlikely character, who drinks hard, gambles, and is full of rage but is also compassionate and incredibly intelligent, is completely believable. He is one of the few unattractive leading men who can convincingly flirt with attractive women, so that when they are suddenly interested in him, you believe it.

Cracker is harsh stuff sometimes. Every killer on the show, it seems, has a psychological angle that is positively disturbing (hence, I suppose, the need for a police psychologist). The series also has humor, though. The scene in which Fitz, seeking revenge on a fellow therapist who's fooling around with his wife, turns a "gamblers anonymous" group into a card game is the sort of harsh but banned-in-America dark humor that Jimmy McGovern (author of the film Priest) excels at.

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.