Singing Detective, but the character’s motive for (re)writing his novelette applies equally to the unnamed female narrator of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” (written 1890, published 1892); that is, the two protagonists write in an effort to stem insanity. The narrator of “The. 'The Singing Detective' is written by Dennis Potter, who long ago decided he would work in television as opposed to film or theater because, at least for a time, the newer medium offered a mass. In the American movie version of The Singing Detective, as in the 1980s six-part British television masterpiece it apes with a frenzy, a writer of hard-boiled crime novels (Robert Downey Jr.) lies. Robert Downey Jr. And Mel Gibson in The Singing Detective. The Singing Detective, based upon the 1986 British television series of the same name, is a quirky film that combines comedy, drama, film-noir, and musical numbers in such a way that they form something quite unlike your typical Hollywood movie.

1. Who Wrote The Tv Series The Singing Detective
2. Singing Detective Soundtrack

Monday, mid-November, 30 years ago, British newspapers were hailing the first episode of a major “television drama event” that had aired the night before. “Every Sunday for Six Weeks: Drama from Heaven,” declared The Financial Times. “Stunning new serial,” wrote The Guardian.

There doesn't seem to exist a truly complete soundtrack album of the original 1986 BBC television serial The Singing Detective, let alone an expanded compendium containing every single piece of music mentioned in the text on which the series was based.

Those of a certain age may be disconcerted to learn it has been three full decades since The Singing Detective, the six-part drama by Dennis Potter, was first shown on British television on Sunday nights at 9pm. It still frequently features in “greatest-ever TV” polls.

Much parodied over the years, many will be familiar with the story even if they haven’t seen it. A middle-aged misanthropic writer of pulp detective stories, the appropriately named Philip E Marlow (played by Michael Gambon), is hospitalised with a dreadful disease that inflames the skin and cripples the joints. Confined to his hospital bed and suffering intermittent bouts of fever, Marlow hallucinates doctors, nurses and other patients miming to the old 1940s dance band tunes from his youth.

In his head, he starts to rewrite one of his own old detective novels, imagining himself as its hero, The Singing Detective, striding down the shadowy mean streets of 1945 post-war London. At the same time, he delves into his own childhood memories from the same year, reliving a sexual trauma that led to his mother’s suicide.

What elevates The Singing Detective is the way in which these threads gradually intersect: individuals from Marlow’s childhood memories appear in his pulp detective fantasy; characters from the detective fantasy emerge in the “real” hospital ward. Reality and imagination finally completely fuse as a gun battle takes place in the ward and the seemingly “real” Marlow is killed off and replaced with his fantasy alter ego, The Singing Detective. The writer character has used his memory and imagination to renew himself psychologically, replacing his old sick self with a more positive and open persona that can leave hospital.

It provides arguably the most vivid representation of the workings of the human mind ever realised on screen. “This is the piece of work I’d like to be remembered for,” Potter told The Times even as the drama was still being shot by its very able director, Jon Amiel. “It goes leagues forward from anything I’ve written.”

Box-set generation

While “quality” US TV dramas such as The Sopranos, Mad Men and Breaking Bad have taken up the baton of narratively complex and layered storytelling, arguably none have quite sustained the intense interior drama and rich metaphor of The Singing Detective. According to one Guardian critic writing in 2012, it makes “the best current drama look like an amateur hour”.

Behind this may lie the different industrial constraints of modern long-form US TV dramas. There is always a commercial incentive to keep them running for more seasons than is artistically desirable, using a soap opera-like “infinitely extended middle” of interweaving storylines and story arcs to resist the audience’s desire for resolution. Contrast this with The Singing Detective, made by the public service BBC in a very different era. The whole drive was towards final narrative closure.

Running for only six episodes allowed it to benefit from the intensity of a single authorial vision. Contemporary US TV dramas extol authorial vision, too, but in the form of the showrunner – the head writer-producer who creates the series and develops the main story arcs. The showrunner leads a team of writers who write individual episodes which are passed to different directors to realise on screen.

The experience of both creating and watching long-form TV drama is therefore very different to the traditional BBC model of one writer and one director.

The best of British

America’s success with long-form drama has meant British TV drama has struggled to keep up in recent years. Potter’s closest British successor is probably Stephen Poliakoff, writer-director behind the likes of Shooting the Past and Perfect Strangers.

Poliakoff is given considerable freedom at the BBC to choose his own subjects and sculpt well-crafted dramas, often exploring forgotten or suppressed aspects of British history. His current drama, Close to the Enemy (BBC Two), is interestingly set in the same immediate post-war time period as The Singing Detective. Yet Poliakoff’s dramas tend to lack the passion that animated Potter’s best works – and do not have the same popular reach.

Nor is there much to recommend recent occupants of the BBC’s Sunday night 9pm drama slot. This autumn has featured season two of Poldark, a ratings hit – but basically safe period fare; and My Mother and Other Strangers, which revolves around GIs arriving in Northern Ireland during World War II. It is “an incredibly hackneyed premise”, according to The Guardian. This is typical of the reviews. Both dramas are in the tradition of escapist feel-good British drama on Sunday nights against which The Singing Detective was bucking the trend even in 1986.

Far more interesting is The Missing, whose second series will shortly end on BBC One. It has gripped viewers on Wednesday nights and won praise for its depiction of detective Julien Baptiste (played by Tchéky Karyo) trying to solve the riddle of two missing schoolgirls in Germany a decade earlier, after one suddenly reappears. Critics have praised the complexity of its storytelling and the narrative’s fluid shifts between past and present.

Here, then, is a legacy of The Singing Detective. Potter’s experiments 30 years ago with interweaving narratives and timelines have become part of the accepted grammar of television drama today. Yet in the case of The Missing, these innovations are principally being used to refresh well-worn TV crime staples – child abduction and serial killers.

This is very different from how Potter escaped fixed genre to play freely with the conventions of the hospital drama, detective story, childhood drama and so on. More than 20 years after Potter’s untimely death at the age of 59, it is hard to find anything on British TV today that is truly the artistic peer of The Singing Detective.

The Singing Detective is a BBC television serial drama, written by Dennis Potter, which stars Michael Gambon and was directed by Jon Amiel. The six episodes were 'Skin', 'Heat', 'Lovely Days', 'Clues', 'Pitter Patter' and 'Who Done It'.

The serial was broadcast in the United Kingdom on BBC1 in 1986 on Sunday nights from 16 November to 21 December with later PBS and cable television showings in the United States. It won a Peabody Award in 1989. It ranks 20th on the British Film Institute's list of the 100 Greatest British Television Programmes, as voted by industry professionals in 2000. It was included in the 1992 Dennis Potter retrospective at the Museum of Television & Radio and became a permanent addition to the Museum's collections in New York and Los Angeles. There was co-production funding from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. It was released on DVD in the US on 15 April 2003 and in the UK on 8 March 2004.

Plot[edit]

Mystery writer Philip E. Marlow is suffering writer's block and is hospitalized because his psoriatic arthropathy, 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.)^[1]

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. 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 noirthriller, 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 characters in the novel represent many of Marlow's friends and enemies (perceived or otherwise): 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 adultery with Marlow's mum and simultaneously (and perhaps publicly) cuckolded Marlow's dad, whom 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. William Speakman plays Mark Binney (schoolboy). 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.

Production[edit]

In Potter's original script, the hospital scenes and noir scenes were to be shot with television (video) and film cameras respectively, with the period material (Marlow's childhood) filmed in black-and-white.^[1] However, all scenes were ultimately shot on film, over Potter's objections. Potter wanted the hospital scenes to maintain the sensibility of sitcom conventions.^[1] Although this was tempered in the final script, some character interactions retain this concept. For example, Mr. Hall and Reginald, who are also intended to serve as a mock chorus for the main action occurring in the hospital.^[1]

Originally, the title of the series was 'Smoke Rings', and the Singing Detective noir thriller was to be dropped after the first episode; Potter felt it would not hold the audience's attention.^[1] The title may have referred to a particular monologue Marlow has in the first episode, referring to the fact that, despite everything else, the one thing he really wants is a cigarette.^[1] Marlow's medical and mental progress is subtly gauged by his ability to reach over to his dresser and get his cigarettes.^[1]

Sources[edit]

Borrowing portions of his first novel, Hide and Seek (1973), Potter added autobiographical aspects (or, as he put it, deeply 'personal' aspects),^[1] along with 1940s popular music and the aforementioned film noir stylistics. The result is regarded by some as one of the peaks of 20th-century drama.^[2] Marlow's hallucinations are not far from the Philip Marlowe in Murder, My Sweet, the 1944 film adaptation of Raymond Chandler's Farewell, My Lovely, with Dick Powell as Marlowe. Powell himself would later portray a 'singing detective' on radio's Richard Diamond, Private Detective, serenading his girlfriend, Helen Asher (Virginia Gregg), at the end of each episode.

A reference is made in the last episode to a novel by Agatha Christie, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. This may be meant to suggest that Marlow is an unreliable narrator.

Influence[edit]

Although The Singing Detective did not meet with spectacular viewing figures, it proved influential within the television industry. The serial met with considerable critical praise in America. Steven Bochco has credited the serial as the chief inspiration for Cop Rock (1990), although unlike The Singing Detective, Bochco's drama features specially recorded musical numbers rather than pre-existing work.

The serial was adapted into a 2003 American film featuring Robert Downey, Jr. and Mel Gibson, with the locations changed to the United States.

The British rock band Elbow took their name from a line in the series that declared elbow the 'loveliest word in the English language'.^[3]

Music[edit]

As well as its dark themes, the series is notable for its use of 1940s-era music, often incorporated into surreal musical numbers. This is a device Potter used in his earlier miniseries Pennies from Heaven. The main theme music is the classic 'Peg o' My Heart', of Ziegfeld Follies fame. The upbeat music as the theme for such a dark story is perhaps a reference to Carol Reed's The Third Man, with a harmonica in the place of a zither (The Third Man is indeed referenced in a number of camera shots, according to DVD commentary).^[1] Director Jon Amiel compiled and spliced the generic thriller music used throughout the series from 60 library tapes he had brought together.^[1]

The following is a chronological soundtrack listing:

• 'Peg o' My Heart' – Max Harris & his Novelty Trio (theme song; instrumental)
• 'I've Got You Under My Skin' – The BBC Dance Orchestra directed by Henry Hall
• 'Blues in the Night' – Anne Shelton
• 'Dry Bones' – Fred Waring and His Pennsylvanians
• 'Rockin' in Rhythm' – The Jungle Band (Duke Ellington and his Famous Orchestra)
• 'Cruising Down the River' – Lou Preager Orchestra
• 'Don't Fence Me In' – Bing Crosby & The Andrews Sisters
• 'It Might as Well Be Spring' – Dick Haymes
• 'Frühlingsrauschen (Rustle of Spring) Op. 32 No. 3' – Sinding
• 'Bird Song at Eventide' – Ronnie Ronalde with Robert Farnon and his Orchestra
• 'Paper Doll' – The Mills Brothers
• 'Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen' – Al Bowlly with The Ray Noble Orchestra
• 'Lili Marlene' – Lale Andersen
• 'I Get Along Without You Very Well' – Lew Stone Band
• 'Do I Worry?' – The Ink Spots
• 'Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive' – Bing Crosby & The Andrews Sisters
• 'The Umbrella Man' – Sammy Kaye and his Orchestra
• 'You Always Hurt the One You Love' – The Mills Brothers
• 'After You've Gone' – Al Jolson with Matty Malneck's Orchestra and The Four Hits and a Miss
• 'It's a Lovely Day Tomorrow' – Jack Payne and his Orchestra
• 'Into Each Life Some Rain Must Fall' – Ella Fitzgerald & The Ink Spots
• 'The Very Thought of You' – Al Bowlly & The Ray Noble Orchestra
• 'The Teddy Bear's Picnic' – The Henry Hall Orchestra
• 'We'll Meet Again' – Vera Lynn

Soundtracks[edit]

The Singing Detective soundtrack was released on vinyl in two different forms:

• 1986: The Singing Detective (BBC Records CD 608)

• 1988: The Other Side of the Singing Detective (BBC Records and Tapes BBC CD 708)

Later releases on CD are:

• 2002: (Portugal) Music from 'The Singing Detective' and More (Golden Star GSS 5349) (3 CD)
• 2002: (Portugal) Music from 'The Singing Detective' (The Wonderful Music of WMO 90375) (1 CD)

Further reading[edit]

• Mundy, John (2006). 'Singing Detected: Blackpool and the Strange Case of the Missing Television Musical Dramas'. Journal of British Cinema and Television. Edinburgh University Press. 3 (1): 59–71. doi:10.3366/JBCTV.2006.3.1.59.

References[edit]

1. ^ ^abcdefghijThe Singing Detective (supplementary audio track by Jon Amiel and Kenith Trodd). DVD. Disc 1. Prod. BBC; dist. BBC Video, 2002.
2. ^Arena:Dennis Potter, bbc.co.uk
3. ^Lynskey, Dorian (11 September 2008). 'Better late than never'. The Guardian. London. Retrieved 30 January 2013.
4. ^Kent, David (1993). Australian Chart Book 1970–1992 (illustrated ed.). St Ives, N.S.W.: Australian Chart Book. p. 284. ISBN0-646-11917-6.

External links[edit]

Who Wrote The Tv Series The Singing Detective

• The Singing Detective on IMDb
• Dennis Potter & The Singing Detective Critical essay from British Film Resource
• The Singing Detective at TV.com

Singing Detective Soundtrack