There was great fun to be had in 1986 when the intelligentsia in the media claimed they knew what The Singing Detective was all about.
The controller of BBC1 Michael Grade raved about Dennis Potter's latest drama epic in advance of its showing. I really thought this was a crime series about a detective who sang a bit on the side.
Boy was I wrong. This was a multilayered drama in multiple timelines. A blurring of reality and fantasy.
With the BBC showing Edge of Darkness in 1985. The Monocled Mutineer and The Singing Detective following in 1986. Drama had changed forever. From the format to the way it was shot and produced.
American television was stuck with expensively produced celebrity epics such as The Winds of War. Bland.
The first episode, edgy, harrowing, provocative and with a marvellous musical number.
Actor Michael Gambon had been around for years, a great actor that only people in the business knew of. Here was his chance to be a star and he seized it with his psoriasis afflicted hands.
Gambon plays crime novelist Philip Marlow who is in hospital because of a severe outbreak of psoriasis. He is in great pain, talked down to by hospital staff. Mocked for his condition by other patients, Even sexually assaulted one night by another patient.
With the medication he is on Marlow seems to be hallucinating. Maybe it is the plot from one of his stories seeping into real life or he is just haunted by his past.
So what was it all about? The best one I read at the time was that The Singing Detective was about the state of Britain under Mrs Thatcher's Tory government. Marlow's severe skin affliction was a metaphor for decay.
Good job Dennis Potter is not around to see the current Tory government post 2019. He would had written a sequel!
The controller of BBC1 Michael Grade raved about Dennis Potter's latest drama epic in advance of its showing. I really thought this was a crime series about a detective who sang a bit on the side.
Boy was I wrong. This was a multilayered drama in multiple timelines. A blurring of reality and fantasy.
With the BBC showing Edge of Darkness in 1985. The Monocled Mutineer and The Singing Detective following in 1986. Drama had changed forever. From the format to the way it was shot and produced.
American television was stuck with expensively produced celebrity epics such as The Winds of War. Bland.
The first episode, edgy, harrowing, provocative and with a marvellous musical number.
Actor Michael Gambon had been around for years, a great actor that only people in the business knew of. Here was his chance to be a star and he seized it with his psoriasis afflicted hands.
Gambon plays crime novelist Philip Marlow who is in hospital because of a severe outbreak of psoriasis. He is in great pain, talked down to by hospital staff. Mocked for his condition by other patients, Even sexually assaulted one night by another patient.
With the medication he is on Marlow seems to be hallucinating. Maybe it is the plot from one of his stories seeping into real life or he is just haunted by his past.
So what was it all about? The best one I read at the time was that The Singing Detective was about the state of Britain under Mrs Thatcher's Tory government. Marlow's severe skin affliction was a metaphor for decay.
Good job Dennis Potter is not around to see the current Tory government post 2019. He would had written a sequel!
