The singing detective

The Singing Detective is Dennis Potter’s first original serial, for television since the award-winning Pennies From Heave. Drawing extensively on the author’s experiences as a hospital patient, it mixes a tense thriller—set amid the dimly lit streets and seedy clubs of post-war London—with poignant childhood memories, a potent case history, and a succession of popular songs form the 1940s. The result is an extraordinary fusion of styles and material: a breath-takingly original all-film drama, and one of the most striking and inventive programmes ever seen on television. P.E. Marlow, a writer of cheap detective fiction, is lying immobile in hospital suffering from a severe attack of psoriasis, a grotesquely disfiguring skin disease. Helpless, and with only his imaginatively active mind to keep him sane, he focuses on a mental rewrite of one of his early books, The Singing Detective. Under the influence of the drugs with which he is being treated Marlow’s fevered mind wanders deep into his creation—he becomes the “Singing Detective”, and experiences the fictional encounter with another character from the book, Mark Binney. Marlow also recalls his childhood and memories of what, for him, were sinister and unhappy days. The spectrum of fantasy and reality develops further as music and songs from the 1940s creep into Marlow’s subconscious. Triggered by a thought, a word, a soung, these tunes fuel an even greater flow of memories and images to squeeze the sick man’s tortured senses: Who is Mark Binney? Is he more than a character in a book? Why is Marlow’s ex-wife, Nicola, suddenly so friendly? What is she scheming? Why are two armed men constantly watching everything? The bizarre hallucinatory elements flip around in Marlow’s head until the past blurs into the present, the real and imagined start to merge, and the writer’s moody thriller embraces a terrifying possibity…