SUNDAY TIMES ARTICLE ON CRACKER

Cracker it's gritty, sharp and doesn't pull any punches. Its qualities should have been enough to win the round against News At Ten, says Mark Edwards. Tomorrow at 9pm on ITV you should have been able to see the opening episode of the new series of Cracker. What you will actually be able to see at that time is the last episode of the previous series of Cracker. You'll have to wait until next Sunday for the beginning of the new series. Why? Because, as ITV's simple statement put it: ``Problems arose with the scheduling of Cracker.'' This is rather like John Redwood noting in his diary after his failed leadership challenge: ``Problems arose with my career.'' The truth is that ITV tried to stage a coup, and it failed. It tried to run a 75-minute episode of Cracker from 9pm to 10.15pm, thus moving the News At Ten back by a quarter of an hour. The Independent Television Commission said no. Our television will not be revolutionised. There are few certainties in this life. One of them is that the News At Ten lives up to its title (ie, it contains the news and it is transmitted at 10pm). The ITV companies are not happy with this. Most of the movies that would draw big adult audiences can't start until 9pm, because of the "watershed''. This means ITV has to run the movie for an hour and then finish it after the news. Unsurprisingly, this reduces the audience. Although it's the Die Hard 2s of this world that ITV really wants to spread across its evening primetime, you can see why it actually used the new series of Cracker to try and dislodge the news. Cracker is, after all, a quality drama. You can tell it's "quality'' because if you attempt to sum it up in a sentence the adventures of an overweight, hard-drinking, gambling, sociopathic forensic psychologist you think, "No, that'll never get made''. Aside from being a quality product, Cracker has also managed to win 15m viewers. It is, basically, one of those series that ITV just doesn't make any more - the best thing ITV has done since Prime Suspect.

Like Prime Suspect, Cracker is made by Granada; and, in fact, the germ of the idea that became Cracker began life in Prime Suspect. Gub Neal, Cracker's producer, was originally slated to produce the second Prime Suspect story. He left the show because of a clash with another project, but while he was there he toyed with the idea of turning one of the policemen in Lynda La Plante's storyline into a forensic psychologist. That was in 1991. A year later, Neal developed the idea into a storyline based on a character he called Jonas. "He was a modern-day alchemist,'' says Neal. "I described him as `the town marshall with a pocketful of Jung'.'' Neal's wife, Anna Price, had script-edited a BBC drama called Needle and suggested that its writer, Jimmy McGovern, might be the right man to write Jonas. By the time Neal and McGovern met, Jonas had been renamed Jim Cracker; but whatever the character was called, as far as Neal could tell, McGovern wasn't impressed. "He seemed very angry,'' Neal remembers. "He didn't seem at all interested in the project. We seemed to disagree about everything. It wasn't a good meeting.'' McGovern had every right to feel angry. His last two television projects had been getting nowhere. One, Opting Out, had been rejected by Channel 4; and his script for Priest had languished on one BBC executive's desk for so long that McGovern contemplated sending it an anniversary card. (His wife talked him out of the gesture "Don't make them feel important,'' she told him and as you've already guessed, both projects were picked up following Cracker's success.) But, as it turned out, McGovern was interested in Cracker. Neal, meanwhile, had been talking to actors, notably Robert Lindsay. But, fresh from the success of Alan Bleasdale's GBH and back working in the theatre, Lindsay wasn't interested in another television series. So the search for a lead continued, based on McGovern's vision of the once more renamed Fitz.

McGovern was writing his hero as a thin, wiry man, imagining someone who looked like John Cassavetes in the part. Then Neal had the answer: Robbie Coltrane. A meeting was set up. Just as McGovern and Neal had, McGovern and Coltrane argued about everything. But Coltrane was impressed with the unrelenting honesty of McGovern's writing: ``There's a huge yearning for people to tell the truth about things,'' Coltrane says, his contention backed up by Cracker's viewing figures. "A show like this can condense all the issues people are really worrying about in a way that discussion shows just can't.'' Cracker does, indeed, deal with what McGovern terms "the big issues'': serial killers, rapists, ritual slayings and, in one storyline, the festering aftermath of unresolved emotions following the Hillsborough disaster. The realistic violence has earned it more than a few complaints. Perhaps the most controversial story was To Be A Somebody, in which the actor Robert Carlyle (later to play mild-mannered Hamish Macbeth) set out to kill 90-plus authority figures to avenge those who died at Hillsborough. Clearly, that character's rage is Liverpudlian McGovern's rage, too ("Don't get me started on Hillsborough,'' he warns), and he has injected it into Coltrane's character. "Fitz isn't postmodernist, or post-feminist or any of those other post's,'' McGovern says. "He's post-Hillsborough man. He's frightened of believing in anything any more, because he used to believe in so much.'' "But,'' Coltrane qualifies, "like all people who think a lot, you get the idea that somewhere in the back of his mind he thinks he might sort it all out one day. Of course, far greater men than him or us have gone to their graves without being able to do so, which is why Fitz goes out and gambles and drinks until he becomes a much simpler man and doesn't have to think any more.'' All of which world-weariness explains why, while McGovern was writing the first draft of Cracker, he kept phoning up Granada and saying: "Look this isn't Morse, you know.'' To their credit, Granada's answer was always: "We don't want Morse. Carry on.'' Granada has always had the reputation of being the ITV company that really cares about good drama. Coltrane says of their studios: "The building has that buzz about it that the BBC used to have: when you walk in, it's like being in an engineering factory where all the lathes are clean and you immediately know this is where the grown-ups work.'' When Granada took Cracker to the network, the newly installed programming chief, Marcus Plantin, went for it immediately.

Given the go-ahead to start filming, Coltrane began to research his role. Noting the name of Ian Stephen, a forensic psychologist, in a local paper's story about "offender profiling'', Coltrane asked if he could talk to him. They met in a bar. Stephen recalls: "Robbie literally dissected my job; he wanted to know what I did, where I did it, how I did it, why I did it. And all the time people were coming up to us asking for his autograph, and telling him how much they liked his Fairy Liquid ads.'' (The commercials were, in fact, for Persil washing-up liquid; still, that's advertising.) Stephen's role has expanded as Cracker has continued, from giving the actors occasional advice "Lorcan (actor Lorcan Cranitch, who plays DS Jimmy Beck) rang me up and said, 'What's a panic attack look like? How do I do one?''' through to helping to develop the character of the offenders from a basic storyline. In his day job, Stephen tends not to help the police catch offenders, but to work with offenders after they're caught. He says he's found working on Cracker a pleasant change; while criminals will resist any enlightenment he may offer as to their motives, actors are desperate for help in understanding their motivation. "It was nice talking to real people again,'' Stephen says, before correcting himself. "Of course, they're actors, but they seem like real people compared to the people I normally talk to ... at least they know they're acting.'' This will be the last series of Cracker; Coltrane has decided to call it a day, although there are plans for a movie and for occasional television "specials'', and Coltrane has signed a deal to star in three two-hour dramas for Granada. Meanwhile, if Stephen is feeling a void in his life with Cracker ending, he could always do some work with the ITC. Perhaps he could find out: just what is the origin of this obsessive fixation they have with 10 o'clock?

The Unofficial Guide To Cracker 1999-2005

(http://www.crackertv.co.uk)

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