CRIME, PUNISHMENT AND DRAMA by Robert Crampton

Actor Robbie Coltrane explains why crime still fascinates him. Up in his suite on the twelfth floor, Robbie Coltrane settles back in his chair, draws deeply on his Davidoff, surveys the stunning view of Hong Kong harbour, exhales: "Yeah, showbiz is hell, isn't it?" He contemplates a little longer. "I do sometimes think: 'What am I doing in a foreign country pretending to be somebody I'm not in front of a machine?' but it is a fantastic privilege." He stabs his cigar at the mass of boats, and says in wonder: "Look at that, that's what the Clyde used to be like when I was a boy. Like a traffic jam." Coltrane has quite a range of funny voices, but for once his accent is the one he grew up with: mild, educated, lowland Scots. This interview took place in June. Coltrane was in what is still, just, the British colony of Hong Kong, to film a two hour Cracker special which will be shown tonight. After the third series of Cracker last year Coltrane had refused to do a fourth - "they were not well pleased" - but he agreed with Granada to do occasional one-offs every couple of years. Lucky White Ghost - Hong Kong Chinese call westerners gweilos, which means white ghosts, and the villain is a westerner - is the first such special. Gub Neal, the show's executive producer, wanted to set it in Hong Kong because of the range of locations available there and because of the tense psychological backdrop offered by the impending Chinese takeover. When the Pounds 1.5 million budget is covered by foreign sales alone, and 30-second advert spots go for around Pounds 100,000, it is hard to believe there will not be more, but this will certainly be the last one for a good while. For the uninitiated, Coltrane's character, Fitz, is a criminal psychologist called in by the Manchester police whenever anybody gets killed. The form is that Fitz tells the police who they should be looking for. Later, through ruthless character dissection, he extracts a confession. In Lucky White Ghost ,the Royal Hong Kong Police substitutes for the Manchester force. Fitz is handily placed in town on a lecture tour. The premise is that the RHKP do not know how to handle serial killing, largely a western phenomenon, the product of individualism gone wrong. "Statistically," says Coltrane, "most crimes are solved because somebody leaves their dabs all over the murder weapon or they confess or somebody saw them or it was family. Eighty-seven per cent of all murders are people who know each other. So in real life psychologists don't have that amount of muscle. There is an opportunity with shows like this to make yourself look absolutely ridiculous, you are sailing close to the wind. There's always that backlash thing of, 'Oh, he shot a busload of people because he didn't have a teddy bear, did he?' " There is also the danger of Fitz making implausible leaps of insight - something he comes close to once or twice in Lucky White Ghost ; close enough to make you think that, while it will still probably be one of the two or three best things on television this autumn, what was a great idea may have just about run its course.

Coltrane's suite in the Ritz-Carlton is all you might expect. Very spacious. Bob Monkhouse's autobiography is open on a table. A Japanese jazz trio does its stuff on the CD. Other bits and pieces, the results of frequent shopping raids since arriving, betray some of Coltrane's many other enthusiasms: a fan for one of his collection of classic cars, gadgetry for his three-year-old, a vast supply of cigars. Coltrane is an assiduous tourist. He tells me about the local geology,politics, economy and betting habits, about various boats in the harbour (hekeeps a 26-footer in the Firth of Clyde), about the approach run to the airport (the planes seem to fly down the street, like a cruise missile in Baghdad), about the way certain skyscrapers were designed and engineered. This may sound dull but it isn't; Coltrane's enthusiasm and subject hopping prevents that. It is a bit like talking to a very keen Dad in an old-fashioned children's story. You ask him a question about a practical matter, any practical matter: he knows the answer. Previous interviewers have gone in search of the "real Coltrane" and found him elusive. Wearying of his personas, funny accents, dissertations, diversions, jokes and stories, profilers have implied that, like many performers, Coltrane uses the tools of the extrovert to keep others away from his essence, or to disguise the fact that he hasn't got one. I do not think that is the case. He certainly enjoys - "loves" might be a better word - being the centre of attention most of the time. Yet he struck me as a man at ease with himself, a man of interests and enthusiasms and ideas, a man who needs constant affirmation but has learnt how to repay it, who has also learnt how to include others within the largeness of his own life. He is, after all, 46 years old now. In his 30s, Coltrane is reputed to have indulged a taste for booze, food, fags and women more often and for rather longer than was good for him. He is supposed to have put on a stone a year in the 1980s. Now, he has a wife, Rhona, and child, Spencer and he has moved back to Scotland, although the family seems to spend most of its time in a rented house in the Hollywood hills. His fondness for the two Regals, Chivas and Embassy, is under control.

Undoubtedly Coltrane has, through Cracker, its clutch of Baftas and its 15.5 million devotees, gained the respect he must have craved throughout his first,relatively unremarked four decades. Now he wants to move on: "There's a problem keeping the quality up over three stories each year. Also, the series means six months filming every year in Manchester and I want to be making films." Back in June, he had just returned from a month of meetings - "Tarting, as Branagh called it" - in Los Angeles, and he went straight back to Hollywood after Cracker finished filming in Manchester. He is still there now, making Buddy , a film in which he co-stars, and which may give him the Hollywood breakthrough he clearly desires. Next month, he will go to the Caribbean to make Ebb Tide , Granada's version of a Robert Louis Stevenson novella. "The real problem with Cracker ," he says, "is that there are a finite number of cases that can be solved by psychological insight." He has always been interested in crime and remains so. "My dad was a police surgeon. We had books by people like Glaister and Churchill in the house. Glaister more or less invented pathology and Churchill did the same with ballistics. It's a fascinating subject, why people do these terrible things. I can imagine, like most people, murdering somebody in defence of my family. Or losing my temper and hitting somebody and they'd fall over and bang their head. But to actually sit down and think: 'I'll kill so-and-so today, I'll buy a knife, I'd better have a pair of gloves, what time does he finish work?'. To do that requires the sort of mind that is fascinating. When someone does something dreadful you always look at the picture in the paper, don't you, and look at the eyes and think: 'I wonder if I would have known.' Everybody wonders a) how did someone get to be like that? and b) could I ever be like that? It's like the West thing. That guy cut his own child up. That's the most unnatural thing you can imagine in the world, and you think, you do think: 'What the hell happened to his life? How does anyone get like that? Why is it that when people go mad they do things like that? Why don't they kill themselves? "The reason Cracker is so popular is because it's about something. It's not 'Hello darling, I'm home!'. Even if it was a duff programme the subject matter would be interesting, because it's about what we are like. It's very honestly written, avoids the obvious, the cliches. It's about good and evil, crime and punishment, which fascinate everybody. Which is why there are so many cop shows about".