![]() The women round the table in script meetings would sometimes temper his blacker thought bubbles.Ĭracker wasn’t wholly McGovern’s idea. “I wanted to go in there with all guns blazing,” he told me. McGovern asked questions about human nature that had never cropped up in detective drama, but would from now on. Provocation and seduction were Fitz’s tools. Now with all that at stake do you really think nature cares how we do it? Whether we say please or thank you, whether she’s willing. Men have to penetrate women or the species dies. ![]() “This crime of yours, in the grand scheme of things, is nothing,” suggests Fitz. The opening story pitted Fitz against a priest (played by Adrian Dunbar) suspected of murdering a woman on a train. He was going to have a very highly developed intuition about what motivates people, and he was totally blind to what was wrong with himself.” “What was different with Fitz was the idea of why people did something. Very often the audience knew who’d done it, “which is instant death for most cop shows,” said Coltrane. The key scene would throw Fitz into the ring with the suspect. “I am too much.” Mostly, though, he knows too much. “I drink too much, I smoke too much, I gamble too much,” Fitz confesses. So Dr Edward “Fitz” Fitzgerald became a big man with a great slab of a face, a bulldozing intensity, and a deep dark understanding of what makes men and women tick. Robert Lindsay, who had dazzled in Alan Bleasdale’s GBH, turned Cracker down in favour of theatre. It won Coltrane, who died on Friday aged 72, three consecutive best actor awards at the Baftas. If he’d said, ‘I’m sorry, Robbie, I just can’t see you as Fitz,’ I would have gone home and wept.” As if to confirm that he was not the thin man of the writer’s imagination, Coltrane then ate McGovern’s pudding.Ĭracker ran for three series on ITV in the mid-1990s (with specials in 19). “You have to respect the fact that Jim came up with the idea,” he recalled when I met him on set three years later, “because it’s a f-ing good one. ![]() The show was Cracker, about a criminal psychologist with Greater Manchester Police who is brilliant at unlocking murder cases but hopelessly disordered in his private life.Ĭoltrane managed a cackle. This was the first meeting of the writer and actor who, between them, would change the face of British crime drama. “I've got to tell you, Robbie,” Jimmy McGovern told Robbie Coltrane over lunch in Glasgow in 1992, “I see the character of Fitz as a thin man.”
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