The Singing Detective (1986)

All clues and no solutions

TV and radio are are little boxes full of many kinds of friends: informative friends, entertaining friends, distracting friends, friends who just won’t shut up and go away. In our semi-regular TV re-watch feature, we take this metaphor and chases it into the ground with deadly intent.

Mystery writer Philip Marlow (Michael Gambon) is hospitalised with severe psoriasis. As he suffers on the ward he hallucinates about his ex-wife, his wartime childhood, and the plot of one of his own books: The Singing Detective.

Who's your friend?

What is The Singing Detective? It's not an ongoing series; there’s just one season of six episodes. It’s not a ‘classic serial’; those are usually adaptations of books. Perhaps you could argue it’s a mini-series. But what it is, really, is a very long TV play.

TV plays have almost entirely disappeared now. The closest analogues are the self-contained episodes within anthology series such as Inside No. 9 and Black Mirror. This is a shame, because it is a unique form capable of unique things. As with stage plays, a TV play tells a single and complete story with no cliff-hangers or sequels; but the medium means a TV play is very different from a stage play, especially in the hands of a master like Dennis Potter, who wrote The Singing Detective. TV plays do not need to have the classical unities of person or place, but they do have the fundamental unity of purpose.

Each episode of The Singing Detective briefly stands alone, but really each is an act within a play that had five, week-long intervals. It is not a constantly developing story; there are no surprising twists or effortful developments. And it's complicated; it demands your attention, because Marlow’s perception of time and reality become fluid, and his memories becomes muddled with his fiction and with his past, as actors and plotlines and music drift and intertwine between all three. The whole is an individual, crafted thing, the product of thought and skill and work. It is an object to hold, observe and consider. It is a solitary, self-contained work of art.

Potter wanted the three main strands to be filmed in different ways: the detective story shot on film to look like a noir movie, the past shot in black and white, and the hospital shot on TV video to look like a sitcom.¹ Fortunately, he did not get his way. The director, Jon Amiel, does vary the visual language, using noir-ish angles for the detective story and period choreography for the music; but while Potter’s idea might have been more formally interesting, having everything shot on film makes the experience more complete. It makes it harder for us to disentangle the relationship between past and present, and between fiction and fantasy, contributing to our sense of Marlow’s fevered state.

This entanglement is particularly striking when it comes to the music. Ah, the music: the most notable and renowned of Potter’s formal inventions. Throughout The Singing Detective, characters break into song. They do not sing, though: they mime to recordings of pop songs from the ‘30s and ‘40s, the music of Marlow’s (and Potter’s) childhood. Potter had used this trick before (in Pennies From Heaven (1978), for example) but it works absolutely perfectly here. It enables Potter to conjure a distant place and experience with extraordinary immediacy, using that emotional valence of music to summon someone else’s memories. The music was as strange in 1986 as it is 2024; an alien pop music long since derided and discarded, surprising and unsettling. The first moment it irrupts into the drama, as Marlow’s doctors all join in a chorus of ‘Dem Bones’, is a startling coup, still as extraordinary as it was forty years ago.

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What kind of friend was it?

As well as being extraordinary in lots of other ways, The Singing Detective is an extraordinary piece of work at the base level of sheer craft. Let take just one example: exposition, one of the most difficult problems in script-writing.

Due to his terrible skin condition, Marlow has to be regularly rubbed down with emollients. In one early, memorable scene, young Nurse Mills (Joanne Whalley) has to come and ‘grease’ him. Desperate to not get an erection as she works away at his privates with a handful of creamy gunk, Marlow tries to think about boring things:

A Welsh male voice choir. Everything in Punch. Wage rates in Peru. James Burke. Finnegan’s Wake. The dog in Blue Peter. Brian Clough and especially James, Henry AND Clive. Australian barmen. Ecologists. Semiologists. The Guardian’s women’s page.

The list is hilarious, and the scene is excruciating with pain and embarrassment. What you don’t notice is that during it Potter is cramming in exposition, telling us what we need to know about Marlow, his condition and how it causes him to hallucinate. The painful hilarity of Marlow’s predicament distracts us from Potter’s fancy footwork.

We also barely notice the further, more subtle piece of exposition Potter is giving us when he has Marlow list ‘The Guardian’s women’s page’. Marlow is precisely the sort of man who prides himself on being ‘subversively’ snide about feminism; he uses that cynicism to cover his deeper misogyny. (He’s certainly more regretful about his instinctive racism than he is about his horrendous tirades at his ex-wife.) His hallucinations frequently drift into misogynist fantasies; he has a fraught relationship with relationships, and sex. When his list of boring things does not work and he ejaculates in front of the nurse, he is immediately humiliated by it; he finds sex shameful, further degrading his relationships with women.

These themes become the core of the latter half of the series, as the hospital psychiatrist starts to unravel his childhood and his mother’s suicide. The psychiatrist is played by Bill Patterson, who is as superb as you would expect Bill Patterson to be; but then, everyone’s superb in The Singing Detective, several of them in multiple parts. Michael Gambon plays both Marlow and Marlow’s fictional creation, the detective; Patrick Malahide plays multiple versions of the same paranoid fantasy; Alison Steadman plays Marlow’s mother and different roles within his hallucinations. Even the bit parts are great: including Imelda Staunton as the Staff Nurse and David Ryall as a patient on the ward (making this something of a Harry Potter preview, what with a scrofulous and sweary Dumbledore in the lead role).

Everything is superb in The Singing Detective: not only the writing and performances, but the direction, the production design, the choreography. It is an extraordinarily compelling piece of work; you want to keep watching not because of cliff-hangers or story arcs but because of the sheer artistry. But you also want to find out, in the words of the young Philip, whodunnit. Dennis Potter knows what the writer Mike Royce pointed out about Twin Peaks:

‘the essential secret of storytelling: you can do whatever the fuck you want as long as you’re also trying to solve a murder’

Potter runs several detective stories at the same time. There is the plot of Marlow’s own novel; there is a paranoid mystery in Marlow’s hallucinations, which concerns what has happened to his screenplay of The Singing Detective; and there is the fundamental question that all these other puzzles are really about. What has happened to Marlow, to bring him to this point?

Whodunnit?

The fact that Potter drops a reference to Agatha Christie’s Who Killed Roger Ackroyd (1926) points to one possible solution. In Roger Ackroyd the narrator is the murderer: the writer dunnit. This is certainly the opinion of the Singing Detective himself, the fictional Philip Marlow, who shoots his author dead in the latter’s climactic fantasy. But Marlow’s own name is the real clue, a near-twin of Raymond Chandler’s iconic flatfoot Philip Marlowe. Marlow’s book The Singing Detective is a Chandler parody, full of self-consciously world-weary hard-boiled talk and over-extended metaphors.

But the show itself has most Chandleresque form of all. Chandler’s stories are famously more interested in setting and character than they are in plot. During the making of the film adaptation of Chandler’s The Big Sleep (1946) the screenwriters asked Chandler who had killed the chauffeur, to which Chandler replied ‘damned if I know’. Life is a mystery with no answer; as Potter’s Marlow says, ‘All clues and no solutions, that’s how things really are.’

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Are you still friends?

Mike Royce’s observation about the flexibility of detective formats isn’t the only way in which Twin Peaks and The Singing Detective seem to me to be similar artefacts. When I re-watched The Singing Detective I felt the same thing I felt when revisiting Twin Peaks: a sense of relief. Not that something I had loved as a young adult still stood up; relief because I was watching something genuinely good, a piece of television that stretched and developed the medium and did something extraordinary with it.

Pulp fiction relies on pre-existing forms and tropes to entertain us. We have a sense of the shapes of stories we expect, they satisfy our pattern-matching brains; moreover, those shapes make the stories easy to follow and easy to enjoy. (This is not a bad thing, by the way. You are actually supposed to enjoy culture, not just suffer through it.) Both Singing Detective and Twin Peaks use these genre forms to cover unexpected themes; they bend and repurpose them to reveal the unspoken psychologies that underlie them. While watching pulp TV we can second-screen, cook, chat, sit back, and relax. But Singing Detective and Twin Peaks demand we sit forward. They catch and require our attention; they necessitate and reward our engagement. They are art, or something very like it.

That aside, though, I was very much invested in it still being good because so much of my cultural life depended on it. It’s thanks to The Singing Detective that I became interested in pre-war pop music, and British pre-war pop music in particular: the clipped, unnerving RP enunciation of Henry Hall, the aching, unlikely English blues of Anne Shelton, the cosy colonial croon of Al Bowlly, and the avuncular tones of Flanagan and Allen, as warm as a valve in a radiogram. These are the sound of my grandparents’ youth, of an atlas stained pink, steam trains and aeronauts and the Light Programme. When I first saw Singing Detective I immediately went out and bought the soundtrack cassette and slotted it into rotation between Tom Waits and Japan, playing it until I could mime along to ‘Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive’ as well as any actor in the show.

The songs were terrific but what The Singing Detective had done was freight them with their context. Like all pop music they had been the background to other people’s lives and loves. It produced a sense of anemoia, the nostalgia for a past one has never known oneself. Of course, they’re now also full of my own nostalgia too, the music of the ‘30s now tied to the ‘80s through Dennis Potter’s magic.

Still know all the words to ‘Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive’, too.

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We’ve written before about Twin Peaks and how it reinvented TV:

1. Presumably Only When I Laugh, which was apparently described by The Guinness Book of Classic TV as ‘intermittently rewarding’.