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 My Life In Horror El Eye Vee, Ee Are Pee, Double Oh El Back when I was bleeding my useless heart over crimes committed by the Thatcher era police forces of West Yorkshire, I mentioned in passing that as a child, I called myself a Liverpool supporter purely because in the one football match I had seen, they’d beaten Barnsley 2 - 0. I also mentioned that it was literally just something to say to answer a question boys would sometimes ask me, and beyond that I cared not a jot. I *also* claimed in that article that I basically didn’t know anything about Hillsborough as an event until the time of writing. And you’re just going to have to take my word for it that, at the time I wrote that, I believed it. But it’s total horseshit. Because one of my all-time favourite moments of TV horror occurs smack bang in the middle of a story in which the events of Hillsborough are intricately and inextricably woven. Wikipedia informs me it is October, 1994. I am, therefore, 16 years old. And I think, though I cannot be certain, that as it’s the 17th October, I watch this particular episode of television at my father’s house, during the October half term week. Cracker was a show that loomed enormous in my teenage brain. My memory is that I either wasn’t allowed to watch the first series, or possibly had just missed it first time round.I *think* the first story I saw was the S1 finale, maybe as an omnibus repeat prior to the S2 premiere. Except that can’t be right, because I have a distinct memory of talking to my dad, either over the phone or face to face, about the characters in To Say I Love You. So maybe I just missed the first story in the series, The Mad Woman In The Attic, and was on board by the second story of Season 1. That feels right, actually. Certainly, One Day A Lemming Will Fly had a gigantic impact on me. I videoed it off the telly, either on broadcast or the later omnibus broadcast, and I could quote whole chunks of that thing verbatim by the time I got to sixth form college, especially the monologue Fitz delivers to the hapless school teacher to talk him down from the ledge, which contains the episode title - a moment that culminates in Fitz apparently talking himself into jumping, making Mr. Cassidy pull him back from the edge, incredulously calling him a ‘crazy bastard’. It’s an absolute tour de force of a scene, in a two part story not short on such moments. It’s also a ballsy-as-hell story for several reasons, not least of which is that Fitz monumentally fucks the entire investigation up in pretty much the worst possible way. Bear in mind that up to now the show, over two stories and five episodes, has built this guy up as forensic psychologies answer to Sherlock Holmes (except, as I’m slowly working out in my Patreon-exclusive podcast on the subject of Mr. Holmes with dear friend Jack Graham, it turns out Holmes might have been a proto-forensic psychologist, actually). Sure, Fitz is an alcoholic, gambling addict, chain smoking manipulative womanizer and emotional rapist, but by golly he gets the job done, and when ethical-but-inevitably-compromised young DI Billsborough (payed with painfully sincere realism and angst by the mighty Christopher Eccleston, forever my Doctor) is up against it, of course he, against his better judgement, calls in The Bastard, and The Bastard gets it done. When One Day A Lemming Will Fly begins, Fitz has already managed to identify a man who has been murdering women in train carriages, in the process exonerating the prime suspect, a chap who had been at the scene of the first murder but had amnesia. From there, he’s drawn into investigating a murder, where, in a crime scene investigation worthy of The Great Detective, he finds several clues the police have missed that allow him to put together a profile of a male/female couple working together to kill. The final episode of that story is an absolute doozy, with Fitz interrogating the woman while her other half closes in on her parents, leading to an epic fear-sweat finale, as Fitz goes int to negotiate with the incensed boyfriend as he holds the women’s parents hostage in a house filling with flammable gas. So, sure, we’re only three stories in, but the pattern has been set; whilst in the first story, Fitz’s ability to ‘crack’ a suspect is limited by having the wrong suspect on ice, the show goes out of it’s way to show that while the cops had the wrong guy in custody, Fitz’s assessment of the actual killers psychology is note perfect, and the scene in Episode Three of To Say I Love You, where he desperately tries to break down the killer’s partner, is one of those top-drawer-scripts-meets-world-class-performers moments that keep us coming back to telly as a medium, frankly. So, having established that Fitz indeed Has The Goods, and is clearly streets ahead of the cops he works with in terms of intelligence and insight, when a school child is found murdered (initially suicide is suspected, as the child is found hanging, but the postmortem confirms foul play) and a school teacher ends up in the frame, we think we know where this is headed. There’s also an incredibly poignant scene in this story, one that throws Fitz and his bullshit into (apparent) relief. Once the murder has been confirmed Fitz spends some time, with DI Penhaligan (a young female detective Fitz flirts with outrageously throughout the season, despite being twice her age, married, and, well, Fitz) councelling the family over their loss. Through a series of crossfades, we hear both parents talking through the inevitable feelings of guilt and grief as they try and come to terms with what’s happened. And Fitz is just brilliant; attentive, asking questions respectfully, skillfully drawing them out, and then, in a closing monologue, talking them through the reality of guilt as a step in the grieving process; and one that, with time, that will pass, leaving grief alone in its place. “Grief is good. Grief is your friend. It allows you to mourn. Allows you to remember.” He says this to their stricken faces, and you see them believe him, hesitantly, but definitely. And it’s brilliant, and he’s brilliant, and you find yourself thinking ‘well, hey, look, say what you like about this chap, that was A Good Thing he did there’. And then, if you’re anything like me, it occurs to you, somewhere on your forth or fifth rewatch, that… well, yeah, he did the Good Thing, sure, but also, Penhaligon, object of his flirty lust for the entire season, was there too, and when he later propositions her, and she, even later, accepts the proposition, you (okay, I) can’t help but wonder if Fitz hadn’t calculated the impact of seeing him do that kind of work up close would have on her. And I mean, let’s face it; it’s Fitz, so of course he had. Anyhow, so when Fitz zooms in on the prime suspect - the aforementioned down-from-the-ledge school teacher - we kind of assume he’s right, and that the remainder of the story will be focussed on the long, slow wearing down of the clearly guilt ridden suicidal man. And after he attempts suicide again (this time by gassing himself), and then after the grieving father and his rather perfomitvely enraged friend try to murder the teacher by attacking his house with an actual wrecking ball (and yes ,that is every bit as surprising and awesome as it sounds) sure enough, Fitz, Mr. Cassidy, and DI Beck (the detective Fitz, in an utterly characteristic display of vicious belittlement, describes as ‘A man who can solve a Sun crossword in under two weeks’) are ensconced in a hotel room for ‘protective custody’ - the police station has been targeted by vigilantes, following Greiving Dad’s Wrecking Ball Escapade, making it unsafe for the actual murder suspect to be held there. What follows is a sustained single scene of dialogue - between Fitz, Beck, and Cassidy - that is, in a quiet and unshowy way, as brilliant and layered as you’re likely to see. It starts with Fitz apparently ignoring Cassidy and going after DI Beck's homophobia, describing a scenario wherein Beck took on performative, aggressive gay-hating at school, beating the boy he secretly had feelings for. Beck is incensed, angrily denouncing Fitz ‘sick’ and guilty of projection - 'Because you look inside as see something sick, something twisted, you think we’ve all felt it. Well, we haven't! Some of us are normal!’. But it’s a blind, misdirection; the real target is apparently-closetted Cassidy (confirmed in Fitz’s mind as such, and by extension the audience, in the earlier scene where Fitz tells Cassidy’s girlfriend Cassidy is gay and she’s he’s beard, news she takes with shock but seems to believe). And over the next - what, ten? Fifteen, even? - minutes of dialogue, Fitz wears him down, finding every chink in Cassidy’s psycological armour and applying expert pressure an manipulation. It takes forever, Cassidy denying, Fitz pushing, angle after angle, Beck gradually stunned into silence as he realises what’s really going on. Every actor in the scene absolutely rocks it, and the near-sexual pleasure on Coltriane’s face as Fitz realises Cassidy is finally on the hook, needing only a promise to ‘share his pain’ in order to confess, is stomach churning. But, you know, it’s okay, because he’s right. Cassidy did it, and Fitz, unpleasant, manipulative bastard though he undoubtedly is, has gotten his man. Only he hasn’t. In a gut punch twist in the final five minutes, Cassidy summons Fitz to his cell (Fitz already showing impatience, boredom, his promise to share the pain already ringing hollow, The Thing You Say To Get What You Want) and tells the truth. He didn’t kill Tim. He felt guilt, because Tim fancied him, and because he’d visited Cassidy and Cassidy had turned him away, and it was that guilt that had set off Fitz’s spidey sense. Cassidy tells Fitz; you said you’d share my pain. Well, now you’re going to. Because when Tim’s killer strikes again, you’ll feel what I felt - that you had a hand in it, could have prevented it, if only you’d acted differently. Fitz shits the bed, button-hooking DCI Bilborough just before he goes in front of the press, demanding he not announce Cassidy’s confession, swearing that he’ll quit. Bilborough goes out to the podium, blinking in the harsh TV lights, hesitates… and then announces in a curt message that a suspect has been arrested and charged. Fitz walks out, and goes home to his wife and kids, letting the answering machine catch an angry call from Penhaligon at the airport, realising that Fitz has stood her up. I’m almost certain the show was intended to run one season only; or, at least, that it was prepared to only run one. The arc of these eight episodes of television is, after all, absolutely perfect, and the end note - Fitz quitting the cops and returning to the family unit, Penhaligon let down, Bilborough forging on alone - rounds the whole thing off brilliantly. At the same time, I’d imagine that once the word of mouth got out (looking at the viewing figures via Wikipedia, a hell of a lot of people jumped on for the second story and every single damn one of them stuck around for the rest of the season, word clearly having gotten out that this was a special one) a second season quickly became inevitable. And before we actually get to what I thought, when I started this, was the point of the essay, namely the final five minutes of Episode 2 of Season 2 of Cracker, I need to make what is almost certainly a deeply unsurprising if still shameful confession; I basically hero worshiped Fitz, at 17. I wasn’t a big drinker, but I smoked with all the pathological evangelism of a newly minted Bill Hicks fan, and where Fitz was overweight, I was skinny and short and with long hair and a pretty big chip on my shoulder. And here was a man who used his brain to get whatever the fuck he wanted out of whoever he wanted to get it out of; who lived for instant gratifcation and fuck any and all consiquences. A man who, without even trying, half drunk, could argue his way around anyone; outsmart, outhink, and leave them, rhetorically, bleeding from a thousand perfectly placed cuts. And let's just put our finger on the really toxic part, and make it squirm, the little bastard; he could get away with all of this bullshit because he was smart and charismatic. Not handsome, not really; but magnetic, through sheer force of personality and will. But above all, because he was the best at his job, the thing he put his mind to. That meant he was needed, and, because he was needed, he could get away with any old shit, basically. And yeah, of course, because he was white, and male, and middle class. And at 17, I am ashamed to recall, that was a power fantasy I found incredibly attractive. I can rationalise why I did, understand the root powerlessness I felt, the slowly dawning realisation that in the real world, or at any rate the corner of it I inhabited, my smarts, such as they were, were not only not a magic bullet, but a kind of curse; the ability to understand the depth of the hole I and my peers were in better than almost all of them, alongside the understanding/belief that I had no power at all to change things. And sure, that’s true, but it doesn’t change the fact that Fitz was/is a deeply toxic man, and my love for that character was/is very troubling and not at all to my credit. Here be demons. And the ghost, of course. Still, I was hooked, which brings us, 2000 words in, to where we started; October 1994, Season 2 of Cracker, and a story entitled To Be A Somebody. Because, yes, this is a show that’s demonstrated that it can, amongst many other very cool things, subvert expectations, pull the rug in quite spectacular fashion. But this is a matter I have given entirely too much thought to, and I don’t think a TV show has ever done to me what Season 2, Episode 2 of Cracker did; a moment of shock so profound I feel the echoes of it even nowm some... fuck, some 25 years after the event, sweet fucking Jesus I am OLD, goddamn. Anyhow. The setup is pretty simple. Albie, played by one of my favourite screen psycho actors, Robert Carlisle, already frayed and worn down by a tough manual labour job, divorce, and PTSD from surviving the Hillsborough disaster, finally goes off the deep end shortly after burying the father he’s been caring for as the latter was dying of cancer. The final catalysing event is desperately trivial; the local corner shop owner refuses to accept underpayment for… I want to say a chocolate bar, something like that. Albie is 5 or 10p short, and ‘I’ll bring it over later’ provokes a calm, polite, but clear refusal. So Albie goes back to his room, shaves his head, takes his father’s sword, goes back to the corner shop and hurls racist abuse at the shop keeper before stabbing him to death. And, I mean, talk about a redundant sentence, but it’s really horrible. The scene really sits in the gut, indigestible. Because Albie as set up is sympathetic, even pitiable; but at the same time, his explosion of racist violence isn’t merely wildly disproportionate to the shopkeeper’s offence, it’s an obscenity that, for me at least, erases any sympathy that may have built with him to that point. And in retrospect, I’m far from convinced by it as a psychological response to his circumstances. 2020 me has some very pointed things to say about how a depiction of racism as something that is generated spontaneously in response to trauma is kind of dangerous bullshit, to the degree that it erases how racism permeates white culture, and kinda-sorta makes excuses for it. But it’s October 1994, and there’s every chance that 17 year old me thought it was Pretty Good, Actually - assuming he thought about it at all, which, you know, let's be real, probably not. Albie leaves some numbers at the scene - 9615489. And Fitz… doesn't get called in. Still raw about the bust up over Cassidy at the end of the previous season, DI Bilborough brings in a different forensic psychologist to profile the killer. Fitz, facing pretty serious money problems due to his insane gambling habits, and pressure from his justifiably irate missus, keeps hitting up Penhaligon (who is righteously furious about being stood up for a dirty fortnight away by a man twice her age) about the case. There’s a wonderful moment where Fitz gives her the kind of profile she can expect from the guy they’ve hired (‘and when he does say that, that’s how you’ll know he’s a prick!’) and when she visits the scene with the new guy, she is, indeed, able to finish his description based on what Fitz told her. Sidebar (and I swear, I’m getting there, but goodman this show): There’s two delicious ironies here; firstly, Albie is so furious about the profile given him by the new police psychologist that is then leaked to the press that he hunts him down and murders him, all but guaranteeing that Fitz will be brought back into the investigation. And secondly, the profile ends up being, like, 90% accurate; white working class, male, 30’s, football fan. The scene later where Fitz delivers this description, having Done The Work, is hilarious. We’re really getting to it, I promise, but look, this is one of the things the show does at a level I’ve rarely seen before or since; it’s as much about the relationships between the characters as it is about the cases they are investigating; indeed, the courses of the investigations are directly impacted by those relationships, for good and ill. In some ways, it’s soap opera elevated to high art (so… just opera, then? Without the singing, obv). Case in damn point: Fitz is back, but the team dynamic is utterly borked; Billborough is still sore with him over Cassidy (not helped by Fitz making even-for-him tasteless references to gas chambers and ovens, in response to Billborough’s admittedly morally bankrupt ‘following orders’ defence of the prosecution). Penhaligon is still furious with him for being stood up. And as for DI Beck…. Well, Beck has always hated Fitz, for all the reasons you’d expect - he’s several orders of magnitude smarter than Beck, and he wastes no opportunity to wield that enormous intellect like a blunt instrument to bludgeon Beck, and belittle him. And there’s a lot to belittle: Beck is a detestable person, not merely not bright but with a kind of willful, proud ignorance that comes from a lifetime of profound insecurity marinated in toxic masculinity (which, by end of the season, will explode in the most powerful, awful fashion, with the events of this episode marking the tipping point). Add in Beck’s actually justified contempt for Fitz’s continued unsubtle attempts to get into the knickers of a woman half his age (but/and/also who Beck almost certainly fancies himself, adding salt to the wound) and… but I mean, just look at all that. The complex interviewing, the psychological depth and interplay, the sheer fucking dynamism of it all, constantly in flux, colliding, spinning off. All this, plus a murder investigation. This fucking show. Anyhow. The psychologist is murdered, Fitz is rehired, and gives, hilariously, basically the same profile, except he intuits no prior history of violence or hooliganism (which, again, yes, Cracker is explicitly about psychologically unusual limit cases, but, really?) and the coppers start going door to door in Albies neighbourhood. DI Beck, of course, knocks on Albie’s door. He notes the shaved head, and the white working classness. Albie, thinking fast, claims that his baldness is due to undertaking chemotherapy, and uses his dead father’s appointment letters as proof. My memory is that the same drawer also contains the sabre, just in case Beck doesn't fall for it. But Beck, of course, falls for it. My memory is that Beck has some family history with cancer that makes him overreact, but also, well, let’s face it, the man is a gullible chump at the best of times. His guilt reaction as he switches from mean investigating cop to so-sorry-let-me-put-out-my-smoke is priceless, but also weirdly heartbreaking; Beck is a callous man, a really questionable copper, not above witness intimidation (and, you suspect, brutality, if he could get away with it) but he’s also credulous enough to be manipulated by a pretty desperate ruse. And it’s that shred of humanity that leads him to make a mistake that, by the end of the episode, will have lethal consequences. I can’t remember exactly how it plays out, at this distance, only that Albie lays a trap for Billborough, and that Fitz, Beck et al become aware of it in HQ as Billborough is approaching the house. And, like, we’ve seen this one before, right? It’s the classic thriller nailbiter, where the Goodie walks into peril, the audience aware of the Lurking Baddie, HQ trying to get through. The signal normally arrives Just In Time, the Goodie able to anticipate the attack, deflect it enough to be safe, with the Baddie escaping, maybe injured, to set up Part 3 as the net closes in, followed by Fitz doing his thing in the interview. And Cracker looks you right in the eyes and says, not this time, baby. I can still remember the visceral shock that ran through me as Albie stabbed Billborough in the gut - memory suggests over total silence. I remember sitting bolt upright, and if I didn’t swear, it’s probably because I’d temporarily forgotten how to speak. Chris Eccleston. The fucking DI. Episode 2 of the season. And he is crawling, bleeding, turning pale, giving a fucking dying man’s statement over the radio (“I know what a defence attorney will try and do with this… I’m lucid.. I’m scared, yeah, I don’t wanna die…”) while Fitz, Penhaligan, and most of all, an utterly stricken DI Beck listen, helplessly… And, like, the beauty of Cracker is that everyone is kind of a prick, to some degree or another, and Billborough was no exception - he was, at times, quite blatantly sexist towards Penhaligon, his ambition sometimes clouded his better judgement, and he wasn’t shy of using Beck for some pretty close-to-the-line bullshit if he thought it’d help his case. So, hero? Nah. But human, and clearly striving to do good, to be good, in a job where that’s basically impossible, and here he is, bleeding out in the street in the fucking second episode of the first three parter of the season, and I am profoundly shocked, both by the textual and metatextual implications. The entire rest of the show pivots around this moment, by the way; Beck’s spiral into self destruction, the fallout of which will profoundly damage everyone else in the show, is triggered by this explosive moment. Nothing is ever the same. The show is permanently scarred by the passing of DI Bilborough. And so was I. Like some of my very favourite stories, I realise, as I start to bring this series to a close, it’s this moment of profound transgression - as shocking to me as the death of Jason Todd, or for that matter the climax of Casino - that lodges the deepest, sends the largest ripples. As a moment of TV drama, it’s rarely been equaled, and for my money never surpassed. This. Fucking. Show. KP 1/9/20  
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