Thursday, March 08, 2001
It’s a staple of the police drama on TV that the hero has some flaw in him – he drinks too much, his marriage has broken down, he’s jaded by the crap he deals with every day.
But in the end he gets the job done, and in doing so acts as a necessary buffer between polite society and the more disturbing world of crime. He might be tainted by the work, but it’s a dirty job and someone’s got to do it.
But ‘Touching Evil’ (currently reprising on TV3 on Mondays) doesn’t leave us with the same warm glow of achievement put out by regular police dramas. Its subject matter is grim enough – serial killers, paedophiles and various other frightening criminals whose hearts are as dark as night – but we’ve seen this aleady (remember Robert Carlyle in Cracker?). Where the show shines is in having the hero as messed up as the people he’s chasing.
In these days of psychological profiling, a good TV detective has to understand some scary minds, but Dave Creegan (played with a sad intensity by Robson Green) seems to empathise with the suspects a little too well.
In a recent episode someone was killing women and putting their hearts in bin-bags. So the heart is rubbish, huh? This isn’t ‘Dixon of Dock Green’, that’s for sure.
The uneasy camera is never still, it’s always raining, and even the most mundane of items can appear menacing. In a quiet moment, Creegan’s sitting in a greasy spoon cafe and we see a normal refillable red ketchup bottle on the table in front of him. The stains of ketchup around the nozzle at the top look for all the world like dried blood. And you know that’s how Creegan sees it.
Even the normal witty comebacks among the cops here take a pretty grim turn. When a colleage comes round to see Creegan at his house, she’s taken aback by the state of the place. “I don’t want to upset you, Creegan,’ she thoughtfuly says, “but the last time I saw a bedroom like this, the bloke in it had just shot himself.”
And Creegan’s not too far from this. Joyce Millman in Salon magazine lists his problems: “Shot in the head in the line of duty, he returned from his near-death experience with a scar on his forehead and a case of the heebie-jeebies that nothing except a brisk walk on the wild side can temper . . . Bad things keep happening to Creegan: His marriage failed because of his work; his girlfriend was murdered by a serial killer he was tracking; he had a nervous breakdown; he came back to work just in time for a squadmate to be murdered by a different serial killer; [next] he was set on fire by yet another serial killer.”
This all sounds a little too much but Green’s performance is riveting, at least partly because he knows how close to the edge he is. The title of the show spells it out – if you touch evil, you will be touched yourself.
Rather bizzarrely, his closest comrade might be Sonny Crockett from ‘Miami Vice’. Quite a few episodes of this better than average police show (overseen by Michael Mann) end with some expendable cops killed and the bad guys getting away. It’s at times like these that Sonny gets into his car and goes for a moody drive.
What both cops share is an awareness that there’s no-one who understands them better in the world than the scum of the earth they’re chasing. This was also the issue driving Mann’s movie ‘Heat’.
It might seem a long way from Al Pacino and Don Johnson to Robson Green, but in their different ways all the dramas look at the price you have to pay if you choose to immerse yourself in a world of cruelty and pain. Even just watching Touching Evil makes you feel like you need a wash afterwards. But you’ve got to love TV that takes you to grim places and doesn’t leave you with a pat happy ending.