On The Singing Detective

That the saints may enjoy their beatitude and the grace of God more abundantly they are permitted to see the punishment of the damned in hell.
Saint Thomas Aquinas

It is better to conquer yourself than to win a thousand battles. Then the victory is yours. It cannot be taken away from you, not by angels or demons, heaven or hell.
Buddha

. . . and then I would have these three months attacks in which I would literally look like a monster—100% psoriasis and you lose control over your temperature, halfway between hallucination and, and whatever.
Dennis Potter


The character of Philip Marlow—named after Raymond Chandler’s famous detective, without the final e on the surname—is in a hospital ward, bedridden and suffering from psoriatic arthropathy. As a result of this horrifying illness, which flares up under stress, his skin has broken open, grotesquely so, not sparing a millimeter of his body. And because of the arthritis, the patient’s hands are permanently fused shut, more clubs than fists. What’s more, an exceedingly high fever has rendered him delusional.

Phillip Marlow, a writer of detective stories (played brilliantly by Michael Gambon, Richard Harris’s replacement in the Harry Potter movies), is hallucinating when we first meet him. From this highly unbalanced vantage point, the hospital staff and patients, people from his past, and characters from his stories alternate haphazardly throughout the program, sometimes bursting into song and dance as they lip-synch to recordings from the 30s and 40s by Bing Crosby, the Mills Brothers, Al Jolson, the Andrew Sisters, Dean Martin, and others. Also, Marlow’s agitated mind shifts abruptly between his present, his childhood, and the novel/screenplay he’s attempting to compose in his head while confined to a hospital bed.

And although I’m hopelessly disoriented, I’m also completely captivated by The Singing Detective, the six-episode BBC series that first aired in 1986, twenty years ago.

This fever-pitched, stream of consciousness drama came from the mind of Dennis Potter (1935-1994), the British dramatist and screenwriter who is best known in the United States for the movie Pennies from Heaven, Hollywood’s adaptation of another of his successful BBC dramas.

Throughout his career, Potter was notorious for using the incidents of his personal life as dramatic fodder. Surprisingly, he claimed that The Singing Detective was his least biographical work. Yet, after watching the DVD with special features—the set a loan from my friend Benjamin Murphy—I was astonished to see how, for this production, Potter once again mined his fears, his obsessions, his anguish, and his sexual and emotional fantasies. Most notably, he, like his character Philip Marlow, suffered from psoriatic arthropathy: a crippling illness that, as portrayed on the screen, is a living hell.

But what most awed me about Potter’s work was that, as a writer, I could never reveal so graphically my psychological warts—not even close—for in The Singing Detective, Dennis Potter appears to be offering us an unobstructed of his inner self, of his raw flesh.

Ultimately, this superb television drama is neither about singing nor about being a detective. After spending several hours expecting a nebulously constructed mystery to be solved, I realized that the real point of The Singing Detective was for the viewers to see how Marlow exorcises the personal demons that torment him. And as the writer of detective stories confronts the sordid events of his childhood that had deeply wounded his psyche, he starts his journey on the road toward developing a proper sense of self.

The remarkable thing about The Singing Detective is that while Marlow gradually lays out his blackened and fractured soul for us to examine—and the more he does this, the more his skin condition improves—Dennis Potter is teaching us that we are largely the result of the battles that our memories, our fantasies, and our realities wage against one another.

The Singing Detective is a fascinating voyage into the harrowing depths of a writer’s personal anguish. At the conclusion of the series, Philip Marlow walks out of the hospital on his own two feet, a victor in his most recent bout against the dark forces that assail him. And yet, although we are witnessing his triumphant exit from hell as he begins to limp toward purgatory, we can be sure that he will never make it to heaven.