ISTOPPED watching television crime drama around the time that a torture device involving barbed wire and a chair with a conveniently cut hole in the seat was used in the lamentable Wire In The Blood. Granted it was a programme in which Robson Green w
as upstaged by a bad side-parting, but the gore was too much. If it's unfettered sadism I'm after, I'll turn to Masterchef, thanks very much.
I do miss the good old days though. Prime Suspect (when Helen Mirren did a different type of regal) and, of course, Jimmy McGovern's Cracker. Robbie Coltrane's Fitz was a magnificent creation – a curmudgeonly, drunken, gambling, cheating mess of a man with a gift for psychological profiling. A hero.
And now he's back. Coltrane, that is, not Fitz; more's the pity. Looking like a clinically depressed Shar-Pei with a gammy leg, Coltrane is once again squeezing his enormous bulk onto the small screen as DI Hain in David Pirrie's three-part thriller, Murderland.
Grizzled and grumpy, disliked by his colleagues, Hain's not got much going for him apart from the fact that teenager Carrie (Bel Powley) – who's had a bit of a shock what with finding her mum smeared all over the living-room floor and then discovering that she wasn't just a receptionist in Cleo's (one of those TV brothels with crackling neon signs above the door) – wants to do anything she can to help him solve her mum's death.
Mainly a flashback from the grown-up Carrie's wedding day, this opener had a dream-like quality. Oozing sinister tension, there was enough of interest to counter the fact that Powley's bug-eyed, squawking rendition of grief started to grate, and if Coltrane had played it any more minimal a cardboard cutout might've done the job.
Still, the vertiginous cliffhanger ending will tempt me back for the next episode, to see events from Hain's perspective before, in the third part, the murdered woman will get her turn.
Talking of viewpoint, choosing Alan Cumming to present a documentary on the louche, subversive world of Weimar Germany that inspired the show-stopping, Oscar-winning musical Cabaret was a stroke of genius. Who better to present a story of sexual excess, self-imposed exile related to homosexuality and classic campery than the man who pulled off a deliciously queer turn as the Emcee in the stage version of Cabaret in London and New York?
It all began with Cumming sitting in a railway carriage on his way to Berlin, a flat cap on his head, his Penguin classic (Christopher Isherwood's Goodbye To Berlin, of course) in his hand, looking like a bargain basement Jay Gatsby. From there, though, we got wonderful archive footage of Isherwood and 1930s Germany, interviews with the likes of Ute Lemper and Liza Minnelli, and Cumming flouncing about in a host of outfits in Berlin and New York.
It didn't tell us much, but Cumming's chat with his pal Minnelli was a treat. Looking like a Madame Tussaud's model left slightly too near a radiator, she told him that, on the iconic poster for the Bob Fosse film (which won Fosse and Minnelli Oscars) her head was pasted on to someone else's body. "Whose?" squealed Cumming.
"I've no idea," croaked Minnelli."I've never told anyone that."
"Ooh, showbiz gossip," said Cumming, batting his eyelashes.
Then we were off to House of Shame, a Berlin nightclub where Cumming, wearing a sleeveless red T-shirt, hoped to discover that the subversive spirit of cabaret was alive and well. Alas, the manager (a descendant of a high-ranking Nazi, apparently) said that the club was deliberately unpolitical and Alan looked crestfallen. Poor lamb. Even a transvestite licking his neck didn't cheer him up.
The screaming crowd welcoming Robbie Williams to the stage of London's Roundhouse for the first night of the BBC Electric Proms 2009 certainly put the smile back on Robbie's face. That dodgy door on The X Factor (rumoured to have been caused by one of Simon Cowell's discarded lumps of Nicotinell gum) was banished from memory as Williams strutted and made that Zig and Zag face he does when he's pleased with himself. He might have been wearing the worst pair of jeans I've seen on TV in recent years (get a stylist, Robbie) but he twiddled his mic and grimaced like a madman. And by that I mean he was absolutely back on form.
There were jokes, crazy-legs dancing and a fine set of new material ("Bear with me," he said sweetly as he sang the new tunes) and classics (Millennium, Feel and No Regrets). And all the while he seemed blissfully unaware that he was being broadcast live to 250 cinema screens in 23 different countries, setting a new record for the most simultaneous cinematic screenings of a live concert. The boy is back.
This article was first published in Scotland on Sunday on 25 October 2009