The Singing Detective: Murdering Songs, Reviving Television

“I feel that people are not dealing with the essential loneliness, alienation, sexual imperiousness, the maleness of manipulation, the commercial manipulation of our sexual feelings... I'd like to think of something that did show that you can be complex and you can involve the entire range of your emotions in a TV drama”.

- Dennis Potter, Desert Island Discs, 1988

BBC4 has continued its one-station crusade to counteract the increasing cultural vacuity that has beset television standards for the past decade or so. Like a lone ream of bog roll in a cesspit of Miltonic proportions, BBC4 routinely shows programs on such aneurysm-inducing subjects as the nature of infinity or a detailed appraisal of Britain's canal systems (and that's just on a Saturday night). But the series that has really caught my imagination is its rerun of Dennis Potter's The Singing Detective.

The Singing Detective is the pinnacle of Potter's dramatic achievements and combines many of his key themes – interconnected narrative strands, a merging of the parochial and the worldly, repressed sexuality festering like a boil at bursting point, the author using the actors as ventriloquist's dummies to announce and obfuscate his own biographical desires in games of psychological hide and seek. Props to BBC1 for first airing it in 1986, but it is a measure of how far terrestrial television has slumped into shrieking, populist candy floss that it's inconceivable it would ever broadcast anything quite so cutting-edge again.

The Singing Detective is intelligent, violent, funny, sentimental and splenetic in equal measure. In my mind it's an English equivalent to the first season of Twin Peaks in terms of its grinding psychological examination, black humour, an aficionados ear for vintage music, and graphic sexual violence all offset by genuinely surreal interludes. By its second series, Twin Peaks had dulled its edges by gaining a greater understanding of its innovations and glossing them, while contriving story lines that made El Dorado seem plausible. The Singing Detective feels all the more potent for compacting its lifespan into six episodes.

You’re left to forage for clues from the three narrative threads, all revolving around the lead protagonist, Philip Marlow. These involve him consigned to a hospital bed with a debilitating skin condition, flashbacks to his boyhood in rural Gloucestershire and the faux-noir thriller of The Singing Detective spilling out of his head. From here, the narratives lurch between reminiscence and hallucination until they collapse into the present during the final couple of episodes where Marlow is revealed as the omnipotent puppet master, manipulating each character with psychic strings. To get even more meta-textual on our asses, a fellow hospital patient called Reginald is reading a book called The Singing Detective and commenting on how compelling but baffling the story is. It’s like a cross between Twin Peaks and Curb Your Enthusiasm, directed by Harold Pinter.

Of course, behind Marlow's own diviners hand is Potter, who grew up in the Forest of Dean and suffered from the same illness. Potter sheds some light on the connectedness of his psoriasis and his sensibilities in an interview: “There are characteristics in this condition of mine which match up with my deeper impulses and therefore it's dangerous....I prefer to live in the point of tension. These things together make the illness seem an ally of certain things in me”.

So his psoriasis is experienced as a physical manifestation of certain sordid aesthetic/psychological predilections and his work becomes a form of self analysis, to which end The Singing Detective is the most thrillingly demonstrative. This makes the filtering of voices in an attempt to identify the real author's real voice more and more problematic. Is the misogyny from a deeply felt place or an examination of an idea? Does it matter if the results are this rewardingly inscrutable?

One thing that is clear is Potter's profound appreciation for old time crooner music. The impregnable innocence of the music of that era is set in stark contrast to the unquenchable menace that writhes beneath the surface of the drama. This is another Lynchian device but it draws on a music that is peculiarly English and, in another context, too easy to dismiss as schmaltz. Here the songs offer contour to the intensity of the action without being deployed merely for the sake of irony. They are used as sensory triggers to bridge the narrative strands, allowing Marlow to spool back to his childhood by placing a song in his father's mouth or having his detective alter ego croon one in a nightclub.

They are sometimes used in the most amazing set pieces, as Marlow attempts to short circuit the monotonous indignity of his hospital stay by hallucinating elaborately choreographed dance routines involving the doctors miming to songs like Dem Bones and Accentuate the Positives. These are both light relief and knuckle gnawingly uncomfortable as it's the kind of unashamedly exuberant performance you would only enact in your front room with the curtains closed. Potter re-emphasises, not only the non-ironic, but the transcendental potential of this music in an interview: “The songs were of a direct line of descent from Psalms and they were saying, no matter how cheap, banal, syrupy or syncopated, that the world is other than it is. The world is better than it is.”

The music and multiple plot layers provide opportunity for Potter to flex many different modes of expression – from the innocent vernacular of his West Country upbringing, to the cockney vulgarities of the other patients, to the hard-boiled jive of his singing detective, to some genuinely beautiful poetic passages. The nastiness is genuine. The sentimentality is genuine. This is what makes it so compelling.