The politics jars, but the character is the draw in Jimmy McGovern's drama Cracker ITV1

Has the following thought ever crossed your mind: that it is hypocrisy for the US to fight a war on terror in the Middle East when for years its citizens stuffed dosh into IRA collecting tins? Or try this: 9/11 made the Irish Troubles an "irrelevant bun fight". OK, what about: because the IRA has stopped blowing people up, the soldiers killed in Ulster since 1969 died in vain? Me neither, but then I'm not a twisted killer in Jimmy McGovern's Cracker. To spot any of these as a motive for someone to kill a Bush-bashing American stand-up comedian, you'd need to be, well, Fitz, wouldn't you?

It was nice to have the old bully back. Cracker disappeared from our screens almost ten years ago, and we were not to know then that the roll of its end-credits was ushering in a dark age for ITV drama. Fitz, it turns out, spent the decade in Australia. I had not remembered him leaving for it. Wouldn't he be the type to dismiss Australia as the home of skin cancer and Skippy? And, oh yes, that's exactly what he called it on his return.

He was back in Manchester for his daughter's wedding in this one-off (1 October, 9pm). Naturally, he was the proud father from hell, getting hiccups during the vows and then tormenting his new in-laws at the reception with his views on Iraq. Didn't a little bit of him, he demanded of the groom's father, wish for worse casualties in Iraq to persuade the US it had made "a big bloody mistake"? This was one of Fitz's more astute insights of the day: you don't have to be Jimmy McGovern, seething at the Today programme over breakfast, to think that unworthy thought. But when later, Fitz was given permission by his wife (for whom the prefix "long-suffering" might have been invented) to play roulette at a local casino, the best he could come up with was: "Everybody around this table is after money, sure, but they are after more than that. They are after some meaning in their lives."

Ah, meaning! Fitz remains the physician who is unable to heal himself, the profiler who cannot suss his own psyche. The drinking, the eating, the gambling, the misogyny - and, now, because Robbie Coltrane's hair is greying, the impotence - what void do they fill? He does not even grab much meaning from solving crimes. If anything, he seems agnostic about crime and punishment. But he does enjoy a good sociopath.

Kenny (a remarkably convincing performance by Anthony Flanagan) was that psycho: a British squaddie who saw his mates killed in Belfast and ended up a homicidal Mancunian cop. After a funny turn with the post-traumatic flashbacks, Kenny killed the stand-up, and then an adulterous US businessman (they come over here, they take our women).

Kenny's final victim, before Fitz won the confession from him, was a junkie who had known he was a killer and had tried to blackmail him. Even he was a victim of the US, as the influx of heroin into Manchester is, we learned, another by-product of US foreign policy. You didn't have to disagree with McGovern about the US to find this anti-Americanism a bit relentless. In one speech, Kenny recalled the deaths of two friends in Ireland and threw in, apropos of nothing, a line about a US war film that pretends "they won the war for us". And did you know that "every bullet" fired by the IRA was paid for with US dollars? Thank goodness I'm not a McGovern character; if I were, my TV would pick up only footage of American military violence.

But this was still tons better than most television. Tension built at several points as Kenny prepared to pounce, and the interrogative dialogue sparkled. Coltrane, whom the director Antonia Bird preferred to film in merciless profile, played down his humour and upped the despair. Bird's film was shot in the dank, greenish hues of a British winter, and what a relief it was to see Manchester painted in neither gangster noir nor the sunlit chrome of the Labour conference. Formally speaking, the writing was a treat, so well structured that you hardly winced at the multiple coincidences of plot. And even if its politics were simplistic/ bizarre, at least this had something to say beyond "Look, hedunnit". McGovern believes our society creates killers. It is a helpful theory for a dramatist to hold.

Andrew Billen is a staff writer for the Times

Pick of the week

Robin Hood
7 October, 7.05pm, BBC1
No Doctor Who till spring, but perhaps men in tights will do for the nation's dads and lads.

Wide Sargasso Sea
9 October, 9pm, BBC4
Jane Eyre the prequel, based on the Jean Rhys novel, with Rebecca Hall as the first Mrs Rochester.

Death of a President
9 October, 9pm, More 4
Or, if you prefer: watch Bush die and the Feds get the wrong guys.

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