The Cutprice Guignol

Okay, I’ve got a show to convince you of: it’s this noir, right? And also a musical. And also a profoundly weird study of post-war Britain, and a man with a chronic skin condition, and a fantasy live that revolves around him in the role of a warbling investigator. Oh, and an actual pile of shit plays a significant role in the story. Are you in yet? No? Well, bad luck, because today’s the day I want to talk about The Singing Detective.

The Singing Detective is a 1986 BBC-produced drama written by legendary British dramatist and screenwriter Dennis Potter, which follows crime author Philip Marlow (Michael Gambon), after he is admitted to a ward for treatment of his ever-worsening psoriasis, a painful skin condition. Which sounds, on paper, like the kind of thing that doesn’t really sound like it has legs – but trust me when I say that it’s still one of the most interesting and unique stories ever to come out of UK television.

The Singing Detective, even though it’s forty years old, still feels extraordinarily fresh and modern in its approach to exploring Philip’s character – more in line with something like Legion or Them than the dramas being produced contemporaneously on the BBC at the time. It’s, without a doubt, Michael Gambon’s finest performance – the tragicomic balance in his version of Philip is downright masterful, never quite tipping over into the impossibly unlikeable but never shying away from his less flattering aspects. The overlapping story arcs that spiral around each other, returning to the same places over and over again with different perspectives each and every time, the musical elements, the blend of in-universe fact and fiction, with Marlow’s own Singing Detective book serving as a setting its own subplot – it’s a gorgeously rich text that hasn’t lost an inch of its surreality or novelty in the four decades since its release, and, for that alone, I love it.

But I love it most of all as one of the most compelling and nuanced character studies ever put to television. Potter drew heavily on his own experiences with psoriatic arthritis in the conception and writing of Philip as a character, and that insight into chronic illness (and especially a chronic skin condition, one worn so visibly on the body) allows Potter to really get into the rough edges of Philip as a person instead of sanding them off into simpering agreeableness as so many depictions of disability insist on doing. Philip spends much of the show’s run excruciatingly trapped within his own body, and that claustrophobia within himself leaves him with little but fantasy and memory for company.

And it’s in this that the three storylines that fill out the show come together – Philip’s childhood in the Forest of Dean during the dying days of World War II, the version of himself who exists in the shadowy post-war world of The Singing Detective story, and his day-to-day life in the ward as he goes through treatment for his illness. Philip’s complicated and often hateful relationship with women takes centre stage across these three stories, from his contentious relationship with his depressed mother (Alison Steadman) to his clashes with his estranged wife to the mysterious and often manipulative femme fatales who populate his noir world; women are both victim and victimized in his imagination, as much perpetrators as they are perpetrated on. Language and communication, too, play a huge part in the story – Philip himself is an author frustrated by his lack of ability to put a pen to paper, and we see his relationship with language and self-expression shift dramatically between his various selves, from the home county dialect he relies on as a kid to the polished, precise and often venomous harshness of his adult self. Even the music takes on the form of language here, a stand-in for specific emotion and Philip’s disconnection from the world around him. In the midst of this, noir is the perfect genre for him to play in – the very specific approach to language and distinct cadence of the hard-boiled detective he imagines himself as feels like a whole dialect unto itself.

And, while we’re on the topic of the noir plot – well, it’s not really a plot at all, as it turns out, because it’s a mystery that never truly gets resolved. Watching it for the first time, I found this a pretty frustrating choice by Potter, especially given how much of the show’s runtime is dedicated to it – but, on a second watch, I think this deliberately evasive approach is one that serves the story perfectly. It’s not a mystery about who is tossing dead women in the Thames, after all, it’s a mystery of who Philip is, the person that his experiences have shaped him into, and by the time the credits roll, I really feel like we have that. Between Gambon’s incredible performance and Potter’s meticulous approach to this surreal story, Philip as a character – or at least the version of him that we meet in the series – is unravelled by the time the story comes to a close, and that is, to me, at least, satisfying.

And the less said about the American movie remake, the better. I would love to hear your take on this series, if you’ve seen it – where do you think it ranks up against Potter’s other creations, and against post-modern stories in the contemporary landscape? Let me know in the comments!

(header image via BFI)