Luke Treadaway

Comedy-drama about the rise of snooker and the fall of Alex "Hurricane" Higgins, who ignited during the power cut-ridden 70s, a symbol of the reckless flamboyance of the decade. He is undone by Steve Davis, protege of Barry Hearn. It's a story frequently told in one-liners - "Flair player? That just means you miss." However, Luke Treadaway brilliantly conveys Higgins' auto-destructiveness, while Will Merrick eventually gets beyond Davis's cultivated robo-nerd image.

Retro 80s nostalgia delivered in a distinctly modern format: The Rack Pack, a comedy-drama reliving snooker's heyday, debuted this week as an iPlayer-only film. "I think snooker is going to be big - bigger even than wrestling," a geezerish Barry Hearn (Kevin Bishop) told a meek Steve "interesting" Davis (Will Merrick) as he signed him up and unleashed his plans for a baize of glory, taking the sport from smoke-filled snooker halls to, er, smoke-filled tournament halls and massive TV-ratings success. Opposite the milk-loving Davis, Luke Treadaway sunk his teeth into the Alex "Hurricane" Higgins story, bringing just enough warmth and pathos to nudge the film past a cartoon portrait of the hard-living People's Champion. "I'm a snooker player - in the end, you're always on your own," he admitted.

The picaresque world of 70s and 80s snooker was so obviously ripe for retrofitted TV drama that the only surprise is that this feature-length tragicomedy is an iPlayer-only affair. Luke Treadaway and Will Merrick enjoy themselves as broad, even scurrilous, caricatures of Alex Higgins and Steve Davis, respectively. Higgins is cast as snooker's darkly irresistible demon who self-destructs even as Davis, in cahoots with ruthless promoter Barry Hearn, is taking the game into every living room. This narrative thrust is a slight over-simplification but does make for high drama.