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