Hard man's soft spot

By FIONA RAE

What's a geezer like Keith Allen doing in a drama called Jack of Hearts? More to the point, what's he doing playing the eponymous Jack?

You know Keith Allen. He was the flatmate who died in Shallow Grave, setting off a chain of events of the most black and evil kind.

He was a drug dealer in Trainspotting.

When the Comic Strip needed a thug, they called on Keith Allen.

As a comedian and actor, his career has mostly been in satire, such as Bob Martin, the Michael Barrymore vehicle about an insecure TV personality.

He even, as Fat Les, composed an unofficial World Cup song in 1998 entitled Vindaloo.

By rights, then, Allen should be playing some ne'er-do-well client of a harassed probation officer, not said probation officer, who is willing to get up in the middle of a dark and stormy night to rescue one of the petty crims he's trying to set on the straight and narrow.

And what's he doing having scenes with a seven-year-old step-daughter who is pukingly cute, calls him daddy and delivers her lines with such believability that you can't help but like them both?

But there it is. He is Jack Denby, presumably an all-heart kind of guy, living in a rather trendy-looking apartment with bare brick walls right on the river Thames (the social services must be paying well these days) with a lovely girlfriend and gorgeous daughter and keeping it real with his clients.

He doesn't want to go into middle management, he knows his patch and he certainly doesn't want to leave London. So, of course, you know that's it's all going to go a bit Pete Tong, as the cockney rhyming slang goes these days.

Girlfriend Suzanne, apparently not as committed to the relationship as he is, accepts a job in her home town, Cardiff. It's her career and she expects a bit of support.

Pretty soon she's telling Katie that Jack's not part of their life anymore and she'll just have to accept it.

Actually, Jack is still a pretty hard geezer. He seems like an ex-crim himself and when he and Suzanne argue bitterly about her departure there's a slightly uneasy air. I half expect him to grab her throat and start a sentence with, "Listen, love."

So the situation doesn't quite jell in this first episode. The scriptwriters have Suzanne and Katie packed off to Cardiff with unseemly haste and, in an unlikely twist, jobs in the probation service in Cardiff are up for grabs.

Will Jack follow? Do bears la-la-la in the woods?

Throw into the mix her parents - a fussy old couple with a pretty-pretty house in Swansea - and an ex-boyfriend who just happens to be rich and teaching in Suzanne's department at the university and, well, you'd think Jack should be grabbing someone's throat.

But Allen just manages to keep this side of believable as a romantic lead.

He has presence to burn, and soon Jack will be finding a patch in Cardiff, getting up in the middle of the night to sort out some Welsh rogue, and having cute conversations with Katie.

* Jack of Hearts, TV One, Monday, 10.30 pm