Television

Tough, fat and fanciable

Martyn Harris

Quite a few women seem to fancy Robbie Coltrane, a fact I have always taken to indicate that there is hope for us all. A fat, frightening, 40-a-day man, he takes to the limit the proposition that it's good jokes which really turn them on. As Fitz, the academic psychologist in Cracker (ITV, Monday, 9 p.m.), he not only has the lovely Barbara Flynn for a wife (once Rose Marie in A Very Peculiar Practice) but is doted on by Jackie, the gorgeous, intelligent, long- legged student.

Sadly, Jackie snuffs it in an anachronistic railway compartment, and the chase is on for her killer who is easy to find (uncon- scious beside the track) but difficult to charge, as he has lost his memory. Enter Fitz: 'I've forgotten more about amnesia than they ever learned . . . ' and we have the makings of a new Inspector Morse, if Morse hadn't always been such crap.

The Mad Woman in the Attic', first episode of a two-parter, had enough skilful deployment of murder-mystery cliché to crack along at a good pace, and some smoking dialogue. I mean this literally, as when a waitress asks Coltrane what he'd like for a starter and he tells her, 'A fresh ashtray, please'. When a cabbie picks him up he tells his passenger primly, `I'd prefer you not to smoke'.

'Tough,' says Coltrane, as we smokers always dream of saying.

'But it's been scientifically proven that I inhale 20 per cent of what you smoke.'

'And you get it for nothing,' says Coltrane.

When they finally pull up, Coltrane glow- ers through the window at the cabbie: 'You want a tip? Lift your dahlias in the autumn. I'm going to say it one day. I am.

The detective anti-hero always has a character flaw but Fitz is all flaws: gambler, drinker, bad father, rotten husband, bankrupt and boor. In a restaurant scene he drunkenly slags off his wife's best friend, a feminist academic, for the hypocrisy of employing a black woman cleaner. 'You are out lecturing people on women's studies at £20 an hour while she has her arm down your toilet for £3 an hour. They pay more in South Africa.. .

He gets a glass of wine in his face for his pains, but doesn't give up easily: 'I think what we have here is a failure to communi- cate. .. . ' I shall definitely be watching it next week, not to discover whodunnit but to see how much better Coltrane can get.

In That Was the Week That Was (BBC 2, Sunday, 11 p.m.), Bernard Levin worked over the hairdresser Teasy Weasy Ray- mond, who in 1963 was standing as a Liber- al council candidate in Bournemouth. 'I am going to set you a little general knowledge paper,' Levin smirked, and instead of get- ting up and walking out, Raymond took it.

'How many liberal MPs are there?' He didn't know. `Do you know any of their names?' He did not. 'Where is the Liberal party conference this year?' Raymond hadn't a clue. 'So how will you know how to get there?' The cruellest part came when Levin tried to get Raymond to identify some Liberal party policies: 'Does it support the CND?' he demand- ed.

'It does not,' said Raymond, blinking through his running mascara, and with clearly not the slightest idea what the ini- tials stood for, 'We have no need to manu- facture H-bombs when America can do it for us.'

`So you do support CND,' said Levin.

'You are very well aware of these. . . let- ters. . . these shortcomings.. . . 'Raymond clutched at his own throat like a man drowning, as he surely was. It was an aston- ishing period piece for showing how docile a studio guest would once be, and a classic piece of early television savagery in which the participant most damaged was Bernard Levin himself.