Cracker –The Last Truly Great British TV Drama Series?

bushtony

Take an obese, alcoholic, chain-smoking, gambling addict; a sarcastic, pompous, belligerent, egotistical, selfish, self-absorbed, middle-aged Scottish psychologist and slap him in the middle of the Manchester Crime Squad as a free-lance criminal profiler. Make this Manchester a city besieged by a string of serial-killers, racist murderers, Bonnie and Clyde wannabes, rapists, perverts, prostitutes, deviants, cultists and general run-of–the-mill malcontents and terminally irredeemable weirdos. And there is the heady formula for one of the greatest TV drama series ever produced in the UK.

The plot lines for the main narratives alone, however, are not what made it great. The stories ranged from the achingly powerful to the more pedestrian, the artistic to the faintly autistic, but that is of little concern. What made this series so downright great were the characters and their relationships and interaction with one another and their environment. Never was a show so character-driven and in such an emotionally affecting way.

Coltrane's Fitz is, on the surface, an anti-hero who should be on the negative side of despicable. The epitome of selfishness, stuck in an eternal mid-life crisis of his own imagining, he flounders into debt, sucks up booze, blows out smoke and has a body that looks as if it has never seen a salad in its entire existence. Yet he is so human, so gifted with razor sharp wit and talented by means of his rare insight into the human condition, that he automatically has the audience on his side.

His treatment of his wife, his children, his mother, his brother and almost anyone he meets, is often appalling and in some cases unforgivable. His moral compass is broken beyond belief, yet he manages to appeal as a heroic figure and we root for him despite all. Coltrane projects him so charismatically that we even accept that the young, willowy and coldly sensual Jane Penhaligon can fall in love with him and take him to bed. Yep, the performance is that good.

That said, just about every performance by every player is pitch-perfect.

Of special note is Lorcan Cranitch as DS Jimmy Beck. Beck is the flip-side to Fitz's insightful and confident smart-ass persona. He too drinks, smokes and revels in macho egotism. But his bluster fails to hide that he is an incompetent copper, a bigot, a misogynist, a man promoted to a level set way out of his depth, whose barely concealed contempt for women and hero-worship for his superior, Bilborough (Clive Eccleston), proves to be his undoing. The difference is, Fitz doesn't hero-worship anyone and at the end of the day he knows the real score. Beck, though, is too stupid, pig-thick and mentally disturbed to get it.

Beck's unravelling psyche is brilliantly depicted by Cranitch, his mindset conflicted by his hatred for Fitz and a jealous desire to be more like him on the one hand and his rigidly repressed latently homosexual adulation of Bilborough – whose death he unwittingly orchestrates through his own ineptitude. Beck's descent from moderately dumb and big-headed flatfoot to guilt-ridden, psychosomatic, suicidal sexual deviant is masterfully written and portrayed.

Although it's Jimmy McGovern's baby, it should not be forgotten that other writers contributed some superb work to this chronicle.

Cracker was a series brave enough to unflinchingly kill-off key players and make drama from the fall-out. To let the pivotal female character be raped by a trusted colleague and then examine the devastation of that act at close range. To depict murderers and perverts as human beings, rather than just token cyphers of evil. And to actually dare to give TV audiences something deliberately thought-provoking and of a rare and undeniable quality and worth for a change.

The last truly great British TV drama series? Yeah, probably it is.

score 9/10

bushtony 31 October 2010

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw2332295/