Robbie Coltrane wasn't first choice for Fitz – but he and Cracker changed British crime drama forever

“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.”

This was the first meeting of the writer and actor who, between them, would change the face of British crime drama. 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.

Coltrane managed a cackle. “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. 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.

Cracker ran for three series on ITV in the mid-1990s (with specials in 1996 and 2006). It won Coltrane, who died on Friday aged 72, three consecutive best actor awards at the Baftas.

He was not the first choice. Robert Lindsay, who had dazzled in Alan Bleasdale’s GBH, turned Cracker down in favour of theatre. 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.

“I drink too much, I smoke too much, I gamble too much,” Fitz confesses. “I am too much.” Mostly, though, he knows too much. The key scene would throw Fitz into the ring with the suspect. Very often the audience knew who’d done it, “which is instant death for most cop shows,” said Coltrane. “What was different with Fitz was the idea of why people did something. 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.”

The opening story pitted Fitz against a priest (played by Adrian Dunbar) suspected of murdering a woman on a train. “This crime of yours, in the grand scheme of things, is nothing,” suggests Fitz. “It’s nature. Nature knows. Men have to penetrate women or the species dies. 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. Mm?”

Provocation and seduction were Fitz’s tools. McGovern asked questions about human nature that had never cropped up in detective drama, but would from now on. “I wanted to go in there with all guns blazing,” he told me. The women round the table in script meetings would sometimes temper his blacker thought bubbles.

Cracker wasn’t wholly McGovern’s idea. The Granada producer Gub Neal, who was also at the Glasgow lunch, had already toyed with the idea of a criminal psychologist for Prime Suspect II, but research convinced him the job mainly consisted of dull paperwork. Then he thought of making the character a maverick. His wife had been script editor on the gritty drug drama Needle, so he approached its author.

McGovern gave Fitz his gambling habit and a knowledge of motive gleaned from his own youth spent examining his conscience as part of a Jesuit education. As for portraying the profession, he just made things up. “There’s no way Fitz would be allowed near a suspect!” McGovern conceded.

Michael Winterbottom, who directed the first two episodes, became the first of many to prosper on Cracker. Christopher Eccleston, who as the young DCI Bilborough asked to leave after one series, exited in an extremely bloody five-minute death scene. John Simm caught the eye as a psychotic teenager. Robert Carlyle starred in an episode in which McGovern first broached the subject of Hillsborough. Paul Abbott wrote five of the scripts.

“What I like about this show is it’s very much of its time,” said Coltrane in 1995. “You could pick this up in 20 years’ time and say that’s exactly what the ’90s was.” It certainly barged its way onto news pages. South Yorkshire Police complained about Cracker’s treatment of Hillsborough, a coroner suggested that a real murder copied a Cracker killing screened on the same night, and anti-rape groups demonstrated outside the Granada offices about a storyline concerning a black rapist.

Most notorious was the case of Colin Stagg, charged with Rachel Nickell’s murder on Wimbledon Common. At his acquittal, newspaper reports unanimously compared the criminal psychologist involved to his more famous fictional equivalent.

“It’s not a documentary, it’s drama,” insisted its star. “All sorts of things happen to one person in the period of two hours than happen to most of us in our entire lives.” One thing that happened to Coltrane was that he was invited to address the professional body of criminal psychologists. He refused.