The Singing Detective

Plot synopsis:
Mystery writer Philip E. Marlow is suffering writer's block and is hospitalised because his psoriatic arthropathy, a chronic skin and joint disease, is at an acute stage forming lesions and sores over his entire body, and partially cripples his hands and feet. Dennis Potter suffered from this disease himself, and he wrote with a pen tied to his fist in much the same fashion Marlow does in the last episode. Although severe, Marlow's condition was intentionally understated compared to Potter's whose skin would sometimes crack and bleed.
As a result of constant pain, a fever caused by the condition, and his refusal to take medication, Marlow falls into a fantasy world involving his Chandleresque novel, The Singing Detective, an escapist adventure about a detective (also named "Philip Marlow") who sings at a dance hall and takes the jobs "the guys who don't sing" won't take. Writers will recognize that, like Potter, Marlow is "plot-dreaming," trying out various solutions to a working plot in his head, deciding as he goes what plot element works best with what character or situation, interspersed with bits of ideas that occur to him off the wall, and discarding (with some afterthoughts) parts of his story that no longer work when other changes have been made.
The real Marlow also experiences flashbacks to his childhood in rural England, and his mother's life in wartime London. The rural location is presumably the Forest of Dean, Potter's birthplace and the location for filming, but this is never stated explicitly (though the young Philip's references to his home in "the Forest" come close). The suicide of his mother is one of several recurring images in the series; Marlow uses it (whether subconsciously or not) in his murder mystery, and sometimes replaces her face with different women in his life, real and imaginary. The noir mystery, however, is never actually solved; all that is ultimately revealed is an intentionally vague plot involving smuggled Nazi war criminals being protected by the Allies and Soviet agents attempting to stop them. This perhaps reflects Marlow's view that fiction should be "all clues and no solutions".
The three worlds of the hospital, the noir thriller, and wartime England often merge in Marlow's mind, resulting in a fourth layer, in which character interactions that would otherwise be impossible (e.g. fictional characters interacting with non-fictional characters) occur. This is evident in that many of Marlow's friends and enemies (perceived or otherwise) are represented by characters in the novel: particularly, Raymond, Marlow's mother's lover, appears as the central antagonist in the "real" and noir worlds (although the "real" Binney/Finney is ultimately a fantasy as well). The use of Binney as a villain stems from the fact that Binney committed fornication with Marlow's mum and simultaneously (and perhaps publicly) cuckolded Marlow's dad, who Marlow loved. Marlow's own guilt at his apparent belief that he caused his parents' separation and even his mother's suicide is exacerbated by his early childhood memory when he framed young Mark Binney for defecating on the desk of a disciplinarian elementary teacher (Janet Henfrey). The innocent Binney is brutally beaten in front of the classroom, and Marlow is lauded for telling the "truth". All of these events haunt Marlow, and one of the shadowy villains who apparently is determined to kill Marlow looks very much like an adult version of the real child, Mark Binney. The real Mark Binney eventually ends up in a mental institution, as Marlow confesses later to the psychiatrist. The villainous Binney/Finney character is killed off in both realities. It is suggested that in each reality, the guilt of Binney/Finney/Mark is entirely the product of Marlow's imagination as in one case, Finney the wife's lover does not exist, in the other it is the name of the character Marlow chooses as the guilty party and the boy's guilt is a lie told by Marlow to his teacher. However, in the end, Marlow chooses a killer, who looks more like adult Binney, to live, and himself to die, thus showing growth. Janet Henfrey has previously played the same character in Potter's earlier TV play Stand Up, Nigel Barton.
Some members of the cast play multiple roles. Marlow and his alter-ego, the singing detective, are both played by Gambon. Marlow as a boy is played by Lyndon Davies. Mark Binney (schoolboy) is played by William Speakman. Davies and Speakman were contemporaries at Chosen Hill school in Gloucestershire, close to Potter's birthplace of the Forest of Dean. Patrick Malahide plays three central characters—the contemporary Finney, who Marlow thinks is having an affair with his ex-wife Nicola, played by Janet Suzman; the imaginary Binney, a central character in the murder plot; and Raymond, a friend of Marlow's father who has an affair with his mother (Alison Steadman). Steadman plays both Marlow's mother, and the mysterious "Lili", one of the murder victims. At the end of the serial Marlow and Nicola appear to have repaired their relationship.

Tags: pornographic, flashback

Review:
About to watch the 'The Singing Detective' in its entirity for the first time in 18 years, one is filled with anticipation but also anxiety.
By contrast, in Dennis Potter's masterpiece, when a single scene failed to trigger recognition, it seemed horribly wrong, as every other incident was written on my brain.For those who don't know, 'The Singing Detective' is an offbeat musical about a writer in hospital, that weaves effortlessly his present experiences, his past fictions, his paranoid imaginings and, above all else, the memories of a childhood that to this day still dominates his life.
Gambon gives a virtuoso acting masterclass, supreme in both his roles (he plays both the writer and his creation); and though the writer undergoes a major personal journey during the course of this story, Gambon is  as good at the end as at the start.
Often overlooked, meanwhile, is the stunning performance from (the subsequently obscure) Lyndon Davies from as Gambon's younger self.Potter spent his entire career trying new ways of writing screenplays.
Jon Amiel's sensitive, clever direction, Dennis Potter's biting, brilliant script and the towering lead performance by the great Michael Gambon makes this a treat to watch.
But as he lays in bed, he begins to hallucinate from his high fever and he begins to re-write an old crime noir novel he once wrote called, The Singing Detective.
One of those times when the recurring themes and characters from an artist's collected works come together at the right moment, with the right direction and the right actors.The story is simple - embittered, sarcastic, over-the-hill author is admitted to hospital with a highly disfiguring skin condition.
Whilst lying virtually helpless in his bed, he begins to rewrite one of his pulp novels (The Singing Detective) and to reminisce on his childhood in the Forest of Dean and London.
That we sympathise with him given all of his shortcomings is testament to this.The subtext is of a man exorcising his demons and coming to terms with his guilt: guilt about the death of his mother, guilt about his treatment of the women in his life, guilt about his victimisation of a schoolmate.One of those films that is like a giant jigsaw - at first what appear to be a random collection of unrelated images which are rearranged, flipped over and pieced together.
"The Singing Detective" very well may be the best thing done on television.
There's no question that the greatest films of the past 25 years have been TV miniseries, from "I Claudius" to "The Decalogue" to "Nicholas Nickleby" to "The Singing Detective." The ability to stretch out over 6 to 10 hours is certainly a key to doing justice to a theme or great work of literature.
"The Singing Detective" is a bold, multileveled BBC series that is made all the more powerful considering that it is based on the author Dennis Potter's losing battle with a skin disease combined with his incredibly rich fantasies, painful memories, and writer's imagination, all rolled into one complex narrative.
Over the 6-hour span, his life and personality, as portrayed by the brilliant Michael Gambon as the writer/novel protagonist Philip Marlow (without the "e"), is revealed inventively and poignantly.
The famous musical numbers featuring not only Philip and his father in the past, but projected onto the patients and staff of the hospital ward where the "real" present action takes place, are so integral to the story that they are a perfect reflection of Philip's tenuous grip on reality.
The forthcoming Keith Gordon feature film, no matter how inventive and bizarre it is, must fail artistically and be suspected of dishonoring the essence of the story, Dennis Potter's autobiography.
The BBC television production of "The Singing Detective" caused a huge stir when it was first broadcast back in 1986, and now it is commonly acknowledged as a classic.Hospitalised by a severe case of psoriasis, crime novelist Philip E Marlow, escapes the grim realities of ward life into a rich inner world where he imagines himself as the "singing detective", hero of his own novels.
From these fantasies he drifts to memories of his grim childhood during World War Two, and paranoid fantasies about his estranged wife.The script, by celebrated writer Dennis Potter, is truly remarkable.
The acting is good, especially from Michael Gambon (as Philip Marlow) who is perfect in a very difficult role.The series lasts nearly seven hours and yet never fails to entertain.
There's no way that an actor like Michael Gambon could ever get cast as the leading man in an American production (for TV or movies).
The complexity of this man's situation requires that the story reveals several different conflicts in his life simultaneously, and how they relate and resolve through psychiatry, The Singing Detective writing, his relationships (past and present), and the music that had become so important in his life.
as another reviewer here pointed out, the acting and casting is MUCH MUCH better in this original despite the lack of famous handsome Hollywood faces (the 2003 film features Mel Gibson sporting a bald head piece to look like a 'nerdy' psychiatrist!).
Thus far the movie hasn't been released nationwide so I can't speak for the quality, but even if it proves to be terrible, at least it appears to have paved the way for the DVD version, which I pretty much expected when I learned of the film.
This series deserves to be better known world-wide than it is, and hopefully the DVD set (which includes a director/producer Commentary track for every episode, specials on Dennis Potter, etc.) will make the series better known to people..
Written by Dennis Potter,the most exciting writer to ever work for television, it is a multi-layered story of a writer hospitalised with a disabling skin disease, who retells the story of his most famous book (which is coincidentally being read by another patient), relives incidents from his childhood, imagines contemporary events and the people around him bursting into song.
A search of the comments on "The Singing Detective" turned up only one mention of Lyndon Davies, who played Philip Marlow aged 10.
His performance of this really central character was truly remarkable, and it was essential to establishing the basis for the adult Marlow's problems.It is amazing that a 10-year-old could play the part, which required, among other things, mastering the country dialect, and showing emotional states so convincingly.
The Singing Detective is one of those great works that inspire something deep within the viewer, leaving them both shaken and elated by the spectacle they have just witnessed.
This is down to the fact that The Singing Detective is a work far greater than anything else; a microcosm of life, love, anger, defeat, consciousness and the sub-conscious.
The story chronicles a writer's decent into personal hell, as well as a decent into a book being written in his own imagination and a book written many years before; with his past, present and future all jostling for our attention throughout the epic, six-hours-plus running-time.It is a testament to Potter's ability as a screenwriter that the whole thing zips along so quickly, with the multi-layered story never pausing for a moment; constantly being carried along at every step by the combined genius of Potter's characters, the skillful and visually rich direction of Jon Amiel and that towering central performance from the brilliant Michael Gambon.
The writing is truly ecstatic, with Potter obviously relishing every chance he gets to play with both the musical and detective-movie clichés - bringing to mind both Casablanca and Potter's own-classic Pennies From Heaven - whilst the dialog of Gambon's inner-monologues have more in common with the profane poetry of 60's playwrights that anything you'd expect to hear on BBC 2.
The story also has obvious political overtones, with Potter using the hospital setting of the present sequences to double as an allegory of 80's Britain under the tyrannical leadership of Margaret Thatcher (bringing to mind the Elvis Costello song Tramp the Dirt Down and those other hospital set political parables, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Britannia Hospital).The story is also somewhat semi-autobiographical from Potter's point of view, with the writer, at this point in time, suffering from the same psoriatic-arthritis that Gambon's character Marlow has (creating that devastating, iconic image of the paralytic Marlow languishing half-naked in bed, being greased by a young Joanne Whally).
There are also the much deeper autobiographical aspects with the young Marlow's childhood in the shady and evergreen Forest of Dean, in which the pastoral setting gives way to some truly shocking moments; recalling similar childhood traumas from such diverse examples as Iain Bank's Complicity and Rob Reiner's film Stand by Me. However, within this mire of bitterness, surrealism, bouts of lip-synced cabaret and phantasmagorical shoot-outs, there is also a great deal of humour.
Anyone who has seen one of Potter's early TV plays or, for that matter, later classics like Karaoke and Cold Lazarus will know of his depth and range as both a humorist and a satirist; and it is this darkly acerbic wit that underlines the central narrative strands of The Singing Detective.Some would argue that this is the best that television has to offer, though I would politely disagree.
The Singing Detective is a work of art too good to be considered simply for television.
Dennis Potters The Singing Detective is six hours of exquisite brilliance.
The Singing Detective is certainly one of the best things ever to be seen on TV.
So from my point of view The Singing Detective is at least as much the product of Jon Amiel and the mesmerizing pictures he creates plus his direction of actors.
It took me a while (all right, over an hour) to understand the flashbacks and the surrealism (come to think of it, that element is rather similar to what the Coen Brothers did in their masterpiece Barton Fink) but when I did sort out the real from the surreal and the present from the past, I was overcome with admiration.It's visually gorgeous; the music is luscious; the pacing is perfect ...
You will have to pay attention or you will miss out on abrupt shifts of a very original story as the central character who is confined in a hospital ward, rejects his current reality (as much as he can) and reexamines his memories of his past and is also working on ideas for his next novel.
The Singing Detective is without doubt the best TV programme and one of the best films or serials I have ever seen.
After reading this i started researching and i finally bought (Directly from England) "The Singing detective" DVD.
It is Dennis Potter's imaginative and intelligent use of the technical possibilities provided by television - combined, of course, with the deep humanity of his vision - that marks The Singing Detective as a uniquely brilliant work.His ground-breaking technique is the moving between separate levels: the present of the patient Philip in the ward, the past of his childhood experiences that is so ever-present in his memory and so influential on him as an adult, and the world of his imaginary detective story that in turn derives its own inspiration and motivation from those problems of the past.
Dennis Potter's "Singing Detective" in its 1986 TV production, surpasses standard definitions of dramatic entertainment.
It amazingly integrates cultural fragments and memories with unequaled acting performance(Michael Gambon), giving full-dimensional life and impact to a form pioneered by Joyce, but with a soul and involvement of the senses far beyond "Ulysses".Although it has a plus 6 hour running time, we are left with a desire to continue sharing the company of this incredibly complex man.
has so completely affected me as a work of art.The visuals of this production perfectly match the "mindworld" of Marlow as he struggles with agonizing disease, childhood memories and the birth pangs of artistic creation..
And one that you need to view religiously, to enter the feverish and hallucinatory world of Philip Marlow, bedridden due to a serious attack of psoriasis.Everything comes together in The Singing Detective: story, music and acting all combine into something wonderful, something that in my opinion transcends a mere television mini series.Michael Gambon is excellent and so are all actors around him.
Dennis Potter, in this case.If you liked The Singing Detective, be sure to see Potters last works - Karaoke and Cold Lazarus.
The Singing Detective is remarkable for its strong writing and strong performances - it is superb.
The mood is perfectly matched by the choice of music and the sets - there is a surreal seediness about the whole thing as Marlowe battles with his illness - best exemplified by Patrick Malahide's performance - he is so slimey and such a cad.
When a artist dies with so much work obviously ahead of him, the world ends up deformed, missing obvious parts we can't describe but acutely sense the absence of.It's true, as the rough jmb3222 points out, that the industry was eager to put out anything with Potter's name on it after his death; it's true that the remaining, cobbled together oeuvre was by and large inferior to the Singing Detective.
"The Singing Detective" is the best TV-series I've seen in years.
Some viewers might find it challenging to watch, because of its jumps in time and imagination/reality contexts, as well as mixing it, but I think it is one of the best things about it.
It all comes to the same point at the end: Phillip Marlow's murder mystery that he writes in his head, while in hospital (often heavily medicated), besides being a search for a killer, is also his inner quest; self-examining, cynical, sincere and brilliant.
His best work "The Singing Detective", "Pennies From Heaven" etc.
was excellent, however he also wrote a great deal of complete rubbish which found it's way on the screen simply because it had Dennis Potter's name on it.
There's a mystery buried somewhere: Somewhere between an embittered, hospitalized writer, suffering from a debilitating skin disease, and the overconfident detective of the pulp novel he once wrote.
Unable to move from his bed, our writer becomes the focal point of the story, who sees, hears and struggles with things between reality, fiction and hallucinations, slowly connecting the dots along with us: Down at the docks a foghorn blares, though it sounds like a whistling train...
Dennis Potter's masterpiece "The Singing Detective" is as good as it gets when it comes to creating intelligent television.
Thus "The Singing Detective" continues to grow on the inclined watcher with every repeated viewing, for one because of Potter's ingenious screenplay, but also thanks to Jon Amiel's flawless direction and especially Michael Gambon's towering performance.
"The Singing Detective" is nothing short of a landmark, controversial for all the wrong reasons at the time of its release, but well deserving to be rediscovered as the pinnacle of Potter's outstanding career.Side note: There's are of course also mysteries buried somewhere between Dennis Potter and Philip E.
There was so much filler just to use up air time (?)...skin rubs, Physician's rounds, hospital ward banter, etc., that the main story line was neglected for minutes on end.
Hmmm...wonder wher I can sell a mint condition set of "Singing Detective" DVDs?.
It stands out not only as the best thing EVER shown on TV, it's way better than 99 and 44/100% of any movie you could care to name.
This last is so novel and different from the conventions of artificial reality we've come to expect in musicals that it alone makes it interesting.The nominal base level is Marlow the writer in a hospital.
Along the way he provides clear tools for doing so.The interesting thing here is that Potter uses the time of the miniseries format wisely.
Too bad the appearance of this didn't revolutionize TeeVee.I haven't yet seen the 2003 film version, with the amazing Downey as Marlow.
The series stars Michael Gambon, Janet Suzman, and Patrick Malahide as the major characters, but the supporting cast is one of the best I've seen."The Singing Detective" follows some days in the life of one Philip E.
In his dreams, Marlow has cast himself as the title character in his first novel, called -- wait for it -- "The Singing Detective." Because Marlow is truly delirious, we can't always tell when what we're seeing is actually happening and what is a part of Marlow's delusion.
All of these seens (er, scenes) take on a life of their own, with some of the actors playing several characters.
The issues Marlow is dealing with include whether his psoriasis is self-induced, the suicide of his mother (used in his novel "The Singing Detective"), his feelings about sexual intercourse, and his feelings about writing trashy novels instead of literature.Potter breaks down the usual wall between plays/movies and the audience by having his characters address the audience directly.
Several scenes in "The Singing Detective" show characters dealing badly with sexual intercourse.The series was directed by Jon Amiel, and he did a marvelous job.
"Pennies from Heaven" is darker than "The Singing Detective." I haven't seen the film version with Steve Martin.
Some of the aggravation of Potter's writing the screenplay for MGM spills over into "The Singing Detective."*The other is "Tinker,Tailor, Soldier, Spy.".
The Singing Detective is without a doubt, the best television miniseries ever!
"Am I right or am I right?" It follows the exploits of Philip Marlow a writer of detective stories who is bedridden with a terrible skin/joint disease and involves his wild fantasies induced by said disease while lying in bed.
Michael Gambon is a revelation as both the writer and as 'The Singing Detective'..
What he knows is the Forest of Dean, as well he might having been born there and it turns up again and again in his work not least in the two mini-series most associated with him, Pennies From Heaven and The Singing Detective.