The Fear: episode 2, Channel 4, review It was when former crime boss Richie (Peter Mullan) said, "I can handle it, I know what I'm doing," that we knew for sure that he couldn't handle it and he didn't know what he was doing. The second episode of The Fear on Channel Four last night made plain what the first, on Monday, merely intimated: that the one-time crime king of Brighton is losing his mind. There is never a good time to be having blackouts, but when you come round to find you've given away half your slum housing to an Albanian sex trafficker, you know it's time to get help. Big-time crime bosses having blackouts may well remind you of the beginnings of The Sopranos, when Tony Soprano would pass out at the sight of a salami. The Fear is not quite in The Sopranos" realm - how could it be? - but what it has borrowed in terms of a dissection of alpha-male psychology it has borrowed well. It centres on the truth that for a man who is used to being feared himself, the greatest fear is self-doubt - made manifest in The Fear by woozy camerawork, extreme close-ups of Mullan's eyes and suddenly muted sound. On the outside this was a gangster flick, but not far below the surface it was an interior drama. The trick - again, an old Sopranos motif - was to make us feel pity for a man who would hate more than anything else to be pitied. Richie eventually did get help from an old doctor pal from gangland times (played by Richard E Grant), who'd morphed in to a slimeball plastic surgeon. Richie passed all three tests he was given and the surgeon told him all was tickety-boo. He also apologised for his secretary having slammed the door in Richie's face by mistake. Richie didn't mind. But the secretary had done no such thing, which was how Grant knew that Richie's brain was in fact a colander. As Richie's condition deteriorated - by the end of the episode he was lurching around with his shirt undone - so the drama got better and better. I can't say I was that bothered about the turf war with the Albanians, but Mullan and his battle with his own misfiring synapses I could have watched all night. The Fear kept reminding me of King Lear, and not just because it rhymes. Mullan is a fading king, of sorts, he has divided up his kingdom, unwisely, he has errant children, he spends a lot of time staggering around, he could quite easily say "Oh, let me not be mad," and, inter alia, last night some one got their eyes gouged out. The analogy needs some polishing, granted, but on one level it stands, in that Mullan's performance is worthy of the great Shakespearean tragic leads. He scowls and curses and scraps, he rails against the dying of the light. He can't handle it. He hurtles on towards certain calamity. When Jeanette Winterson was asked in 1992 to name the best novel of the year, she chose Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson. It was an inauspicious start to a decade in which many reviewers thought her novels, like Richie Bennett's memory, got steadily worse. But with her having written several admirable books across several genres in the new millennium there's been something of a critical rapprochement, and with her recent memoir, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? she has returned to being interesting, as opposed to just gobby.