Danny Dyer’s Deadliest Men is Class A car crash TV

Best show on British television, by a country mile? Danny Dyer's Deadliest Men. Currently on perpetual repeat on Bravo to keep its slathering fans at bay whilst a third series is being made, each show opens with the actor Danny Dyer in a high-collared Mod's overcoat telling the camera he is about to interview one of the hardest men in England.

The rain poings off his unblinking face to the theme music of Get Carter. Danny, previously famous for playing fast-winking cockney geezers and football hooligans, then gets immediately stuck in, last week with Stephen French, a notorious Liverpudlian who made a fortune stealing money from drug dealers, before launching a campaign against gun crime and embracing the sharing of coffee with social workers.

“I had apprehension, not fear,” said French. “That’s Japanese”

This is the first time, Danny says, that French has opened his world up to the cameras. Cut to French doing Tai Chi on a cliff. (Never trust a man who does martial arts. Put them in the same coffin as women who think they 'might be bit psychic'.) French invites Danny into his BMW 730 and floats through the streets as though it were a galleon.

Danny rests his head against the plush leather and eyes Merseyside through the tinted windows. He could be scared, or he could be wondering if he left the gas on, it's hard to say. Suddenly French turns the car around and takes them to a place in the woods where he says someone would have killed him last month if he hadn't broken free using karate and then waded into a pond in the dusk, using his long black coat to hide underneath, blending into a pile of rocks (like Frodo with his magic cloak in Lord of the Rings?)

"I had apprehension, not fear," said French. "That's Japanese." Danny looks completely blank. He was in a torpor, almost outside consciousness. And this is the great thing about the show, its solid gold secret weapon: Danny Dyer's exquisite emptiness. He is the prince of absence. He's there, but he's elsewhere. Sure, he's officially the likeable gobby cockney wideboy with a witty platitude ready at the tip of his tongue, but too frequently the mask slips and we see the compelling blank page beneath.

His face likes to set into a rigor mortis grin under a remote frown - as though he were hearing a bee buzzing very far away in his head or storm-drains being cleared in distant Vancouver. The effect of this blankness - and perhaps it's just Dyer thinking rile this fucker and I'll get my ass handed to me in a hubcap, and no more complicated than that, but still - the effect is to render his interlocutor's mouth into a fulminating gaspipe.

Whoever is opposite him just talks and talks and talks and talks. They talk so much they even bamboozle themselves, as though it were all happening against their will, endless, like an exasperated airline stewardess going through her mantra before a collision.

Of course you're aware that a lot of what they're saying is rubbish. As human organs go, the memory is about as reliable as the penis, and these guys are mental to boot, with a history of inner-city riots, crack and torture grated on top. But oh, Danny boy!

That other genius interviewer of hardnuts, Ross Kemp, probably commands more immediate respect, but Danny's essential innocence beckons the baddies right into the confessional - where they royally hang themselves.

I'm telling you, this is Class A car crash telly (I will never forget French - an egomaniac of the first order - weeping insincerely over a grave like Cape Fear's Max Cady, whilst the camera came close enough to show his pristine white Y-fronts shining through his expensive tracksuit, hinting that possibly Sean was a cleanliness nut too, on top of everything else).

Actually, one can postulate with confidence before tuning in that each programme will contain at least one scene of the protagonist crying at a grave. The other week Danny interviewed a one-time loyalist paramilitary - now gay and living by the seaside with a bullet proof vest, a poodle, and a copy of Rod Stewart in concert - who filled right up when he remembered how his best friend Mad Dog nearly met his end at a UB40 concert.

That great stock character, the sentimental psychopath, has never been more alive and well. ·