Cracker (1993-1995)

Over the past few months Cal and I have been working our way through Cracker, the UK series in which Robbie Coltrane’s Fitz is a gambling, drinking, smoking psychologist helping the messed-up police solve crimes. I haven’t watched most of it since the NZ broadcast in the early 90s. It has been fascinating, and sometimes painful, to watch as the wheels come off and the show spins out of control. In its first episodes, it was as fierce and confident as Fitz himself, spinning out complex plots with apparent ease and drawing characters with clear centres but deliberately obscuring their boundaries. Jimmy McGovern, series creator and principal writer, was rightly hailed for this work. I remember a time when every interview with a TV creator would say “I wish we could write like Jimmy McGovern on Cracker”. (Heck, I remember someone working on endlessly barmy NZ soap Shortland Street saying that.)
But it was Jimmy McGovern’s celebrated writing that ruined Cracker.
As it went on, Cracker became a show so enamoured with its own premise that it wound in on itself to breaking point. McGovern forced the characters through misery after misery, each time delivering bigger and bigger hammer blows. More shamefully, he would not release any character from a spiral of self-destruction; each of them rushed into their own failings with such heedlessness that it went beyond human frailty and poor decisionmaking, and became a ludicrous act of contortion.
Like the careful emotional weighting, the deft pacing of the early episodes also disappeared: compare the economy of storytelling in the first episodes, where major plot developments are introduced and resolved in 5-second sequences and two short lines of dialogue, with the laboured pace that had set in by the end of the second season.
The best Cracker story is also the precise moment when the wheels first slipped the tracks. The second season’s opener, To Be A Somebody, was an excellent story with Robert Carlyle’s killer drawn so very plausibly and a clear role for Fitz’s psychological expertise (which, in later episodes, acquired the aura of magic). Most shockingly, it saw the murder of one of the core cast, Chris Eccleston’s DCI Bilborough.
But McGovern couldn’t resist the temptation to pile it on. Not only did Bilborough die, his 2IC Jimmy Beck (who hero-worshipped and, it was unsubtly hinted, loved his boss) had made a crucial mistake that led to the death. McGovern steered the unlikeable and hapless Beck down into such a pit that he raped the remaining core cast member, Jane Penhaligon. Penhaligon became hardened, casually vicious and vengeful; Beck eventually committed suicide, laying guilt back on Penhaligon’s shoulders. And all of this, of course, served to make Fitz’s life miserable in countless ways.
Then McGovern left the series. There wasn’t much left for anyone else to work with by this stage.
If the decision to make Beck responsible for Bilborough’s death was where things first went wrong, it was the decision to have Beck rape Penhaligon that was the point of no return. The story was massively controversial in its day, and it still doesn’t read easily in terms of politics – the name of the serial, Men Should Weep, is a clear indicator of who McGovern is trying to indict with the story but it is hardly sympathetic to a feminist reading. McGovern himself calls Cracker the “first post-feminist drama series” and a rejection of political correctness. There is one unforgivable moment, a moment that I cannot believe any woman would have written with a straight face, where Fitz’s wife tells Penhaligon (who had been sleeping with Fitz) that “there was a poetic justice to her rape”.
So. Cracker. I loved it to bits fifteen years ago, and there’s still a lot to like now, but the problems rise up and strangle it. Fitz the character is so good at uncovering the motives of the murderers he meets; I wonder what he would have made of McGovern’s urge to so completely destroy the characters he had created.