Independent, The (London): Television Review

WHEN I say that poker is a funny world, be sure I don't mean funny ha-ha. "Devilfish", the first film in a series about gambling called Jackpot (BBC2), was a portrait of Britain's foremost poker player, Dave Ulliot, aka Devilfish for more or less random reasons. According to his fellow gamblers, Ulliot was a master of wit - "the Noel Coward of Scunthorpe," said one. Judging by some of the ribald exchanges we heard, they may have been confusing Noel Coward with Roy "Chubby" Brown.

Still, getting laughs was not what Ulliot was interested in. His jokes were a device for winding up his opponents, provoking them into gambling more ambitiously and, most importantly, masking his own feelings. As far as the last went, he succeeded beautifully - poker- faced doesn't begin to cover it. Ulliot's impenetrability, his ability to meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two impostors just the same, gave director Richard Macer's film most of its fascination. Whether he was crashing out of an international tournament in the afternoon or winning pounds 12,000 in a private game the same evening, he confronted the camera with an identical stare of gloomy apathy and an indistinguishable minor-key drawl. At only one point, when a trip to Paris was going particularly badly, did he look and sound perceptibly browned off - brooding in his hotel room, he said that he'd left the balcony door open in case he wanted to throw himself off.

For the rest, though, you were left to guess at what drove him on, what pleasure he took from the game. The poker players who talked about him at the beginning said that it was the sheer thrill, not the money, and perhaps they were in a better position to guess. Then again, perhaps they just found that motive more attractive. At any rate, it was noticeable that Ulliot's conversations all revolved around money, about how many thousands he was up or down on the week. This was unsurprising, given that he had seven children to support back home. "My beautiful boys," he called them, without much conviction.

Late at night, in anonymous hotel rooms, he talked to the camera about the frustrations of the game, the tedium of long drives up the motorway, the nights spent in smoke-filled rooms with idiots, the insecurities of the poker world: "Lying, backstabbing... You get a few gentlemen, but 90 per cent of the time they're all bad hombres." He'd heard of games being raided by men with shotguns and of people being mugged outside casinos.

Ulliot said that he didn't want his sons getting involved in that sort of game - he'd rather they were bank managers. But we also saw him teaching them how to play blackjack; and as the eldest, Dave Jnr, said, "It's understandable how easily influenced I am by his lifestyle, by his profession." At one point, the commentary informed us that Dave Jnr had been seen in a betting shop, and a couple of minutes later Dave Snr was giving him a talking-to over the dinner table. Still, it was hard to tell whether he was really very bothered about this, or about anything. I wouldn't have put money on it. But the chilliness that made him so hard to like also made this an admirably compelling little film.