Robbie Coltrane makes Cracker worth the discomfort, giving Fitz enough humour to keep his excesses from becoming merely exhausting. The writing sometimes presses too hard, but this is crime drama with a difficult, compelling centre.
Cracker is a forceful crime drama, carried by Robbie Coltrane’s funny, abrasive performance as Edward ‘Fitz’ Fitzgerald. It asks a great deal of our appetite for a man who drinks, smokes and gambles too much. He is frank about his bad habits, which makes it tempting to forgive them sooner than we should. We recommend it, with the qualification that his company can become tiring well before the writing seems ready to concede the point.
Coltrane gets the comedy out of Fitz’s confidence in his own excess. There is something funny about a man presenting a list of bad habits with so little apparent embarrassment, and something wearing about the prospect of hearing it again. We laughed at that shamelessness, then felt uneasy about how quickly we had warmed to him. Coltrane is persuasive enough to make us briefly overlook how much indulgence Fitz is asking for, and alert enough to make that indulgence feel questionable.
Jimmy McGovern’s writing credit matters, although Paul Abbott and Ted Whitehead also contribute to the series. The attraction is the willingness to give the central character qualities that can irritate us without immediately smoothing them away. The weakness comes when the writing leans on those qualities too insistently, as though another demonstration of excess will necessarily tell us something new. Fitz can be over-explained by repetition, and there are stretches where the insistence makes him feel less interesting.
Barbara Flynn, as Judith Fitzgerald, is particularly valuable because her presence does not need to match Coltrane’s force to register. We notice the comparative restraint, and welcome it. Geraldine Somerville’s Jane ‘Panhandle’ Penhaligon also helps keep our attention from settling permanently on Fitz. Alongside Lorcan Cranitch as DS Jimmy Beck and Christopher Eccleston as Bilborough, these performances give the series enough human variety to keep Fitz from exhausting our interest; there are other people here worth attending to.
We like the lack of fuss in the cinematography credited to Ivan Strasburg and Dick Dodd. It gives the actors priority, a sensible choice when Coltrane already supplies so much force. Editors including Oral Norrie Ottey, Edward Mansell and Tony Cranstoun have similarly demanding material to manage; the pacing feels most assured when the performances have room. That room matters for the quieter actors, whose work takes a little longer to register beside Coltrane, and whose contributions reward the attention.
For a crime drama built around such a prominent lead, Cracker is unusually willing to let affection become difficult. Coltrane never needs us to find Fitz agreeable all the time, and the programme is stronger when it trusts that. Its humour helps, but it does not make the drinking and gambling seem harmless. We keep watching because Coltrane makes this difficult man worth the trouble of trying to understand. Choose it for him, and allow for the moments when spending an hour with Fitz feels like a longer commitment.
