Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1516 in DVD
• Released on: 2004-03-08
• Rating: Suitable for 15 years and over
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Number of discs: 3
• Format: PAL
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 3
• Running time: 392 minutes

Amazon.co.uk Review
The late Dennis Potter was a master at mining the popular songs of the 1930s and '40s for dramatic effect, but he never did it better than in The Singing Detective. The inestimable Michael Gambon plays a mystery writer named Philip E Marlow, who is suffering a torturous bout of psoriatic arthritis in hospital, where he is a victim of both his disease and the National Health Service. Unable to move without pain, he escapes into his imagination, plotting out a murder tale in which he is both a big-band singer and a private eye. But Potter and director Jon Amiel also mix in flashbacks of Marlow's youth and his unhappy marriage to explain how the real Marlow reached this sorry pass. Flawlessly, intricately, kaleidoscopically assembled, the six one-hour episodes fly by like some fantastic fever dream. –Marshall Fine

DVD Description
The story of The Singing Detective unfolds in three time periods: a 1980s hospital ward, The Forest of Dean (and later London) in the 1930s and a film-noir fantasy London of the 1940s. The link between these 'worlds' and the protagonist of the story is Philip Marlow, the writer recovering from psoriasis in the hospital. The story follows his recovery from his skin condition and parallel assimilation of a childhood trauma he suffered in the 1930s. The Forest of Dean parts of the story are Marlow's childhood memories. The young Philip, it is revealed, witnessed his mother's adultery with Raymond Binney and took revenge upon his backward son Mark by implicating him for a schoolroom crime he committed. The film-noir fantasy is from a novel he wrote entitled The Singing Detective in which the character, Mark Binney, hires the help of the detective, Philip Marlow, to help him escape being framed for a murder.

Special Features

• Close Up with Dennis Potter (edits)
  
• Arena segment
  
• 2 x Points of View segments
  
• Cast filmographies
  
• Commentary with Kenith Trodd and Jon Amiel

DVD Technical Information:

• Total Running Time: 360 minutes approx.
  
• Aspect Ratio: Fullscreen 4:3
  
• Region Code: 2

Customer Reviews

Outstanding Drama
The Singing Detective is an absolutely cracking piece of drama, and it is wonderful to see it superbly transferred to DVD by the BBC. The last time I saw this was on VHS tape, when the picture was murky and dull; now we have a clear sharp image-as good as we can expect from a programme 20 years old.

Good drama depends on three factors: script, acting and production/direction. Dennis Potter's script is one of the finest he produced. Whilst a crime writer, with a horrible skin condition, lies in hospital, his thoughts turn to one of his books. He looks back on some incidents from his childhood. He imagines hospital staff dancing to 1930's popular songs (some memorable scenes here). One moment there is laughter, the next, pathos. And gradually the threads are brought together leading to a surprisingly upbeat ending. Michael Gambon's performance as the writer Marlow is stunning, yet this is one of those series where everyone's is a fine performance. Production is excellent: those crazy dance scenes must have taken some work.

The extras are considerable, including excerpts from 'Points of View' (I never did understand what all the fuss about the 'sex' scene was about) , and a Close Up documentary I had never seen before, with some interesting and relevant observations on Potter's life and works.

At just fifteen pounds for the set-3 discs-this is astonishing value and I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Many More Stars Deserved Here
This is indeed one of the finest television productions ever filmed. I see that it is the property of Fox, so one would hope that a DVD is on the way, as the price for the taped set is exorbitant. Michael Gambon achieved deserved praise and fame for his brilliant, tour-de-force performance as Philip Marlowe (yes, that's rather an obvious pun, but the humor and wealth of ideas on display in this work in no way fall into that category). Director Potter had one of the truly eccentric, surreal and comic imaginations of the past 50 years. This masterpiece definitely falls under the heading, "MUST VIEWING." Hopefully, it will be far more accessible to the viewing public in the near future. In fact, since this review was first written, I've learned that a DVD will be released shortly in the states. Not certain about UK plans.

A spectacle for the eyes & a treat for the brain...
The Singing Detective is one of those great works of filmic art that inspire something deep within the viewer, leaving them both shaken and elated by the spectacle they have just witnessed. Few cinematic works can inspire such a feeling within me, let alone a work for television, and it is this sense of genius in the face of idiocy that elevates this work above the merely cosy ranks of say, Cracker, Brideshead Revisited, and Prime Suspect et al. This is down to the fact that The Singing Detective is a work bigger than anything else... a microcosm of life, love, anger, defeat, consciousness and the sub-conscious. It deals with the intricate realms of fantasy and reality, the written, the understood and the real. If this sounds complicated to you then we're on the right track... because this is one of Dennis Potter's most detailed narrative constructs; chronicling a writer's decent into personal hell, as well as a decent into a book being written in his own imagination and a book written many years before, with his past, present and future all jostling for our attention throughout the epic, six-hours-plus running-time.

It is a testament to Potter's ability as a screenwriter that the whole thing zips along so quickly, with the multi-layered story never pausing for a moment... being carried along at every step by the combined genius of Potter's characters, the skilful and visually sublime direction of Jon Amiel and that towering central performance from the brilliant Michael Gambon. The writing is truly ecstatic (or explicit, depending on your appreciation of foul mouthed monologues and narration delivered straight to camera) with Potter obviously relishing every chance he gets to play with both the musical and detective-movie clichés - bringing to mind both Casablanca and Potter's own-classic Pennies From Heaven - whilst the dialog of Gambon's inner-monologues have more in common with the profane poetry of writers like Mike Leigh and David Leland etc. The story also has political overtones (didn't everything in the 80's?) with Potter using the hospital setting of the present sequences to double as an allegory of 80's Britain under the tyrannical leadership of Margaret Thatcher (bringing to mind the Elvis Costello song Tramp the Dirt Down and that other hospital set political parable, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest).

The story is also somewhat semi-autobiographical from Potter's point of view with the writer, at this point in time, suffering from the same psoriatic-arthritis that Gambon's character Marlow has (creating that devastating, iconic image of the paralytic Marlow languishing half-naked in bed, being greased by a young Joanne Whally!!). There are also the much deeper autobiographical aspects with the young Marlow's childhood in the shady and evergreen Forest of Dean, in which the pastoral setting gives way to some truly shocking moments (recalling similar childhood traumas from such diverse examples as Iain Bank's Complicity and Rob Reiner's film Stand by Me). However, within this mire of bitterness, surrealism, bouts of lip-synced cabaret and phantasmagorical shoot-outs, there is also a great deal of humour. Anyone who has seen one of Potter's early TV plays or, for that matter, later classics like Karaoke and Cold Lazarus will know of his depth and range as both a humorist and a satirist... and it is this darkly acerbic wit that underlines the central narrative strands of The Singing Detective.

Some would argue that this is the best that television has to offer, though I would politely disagree. The Singing Detective is a work of art too good for TV. Now, thanks to the magic of DVD we have the chance to experience Potter's classic in it's definitive unabridged, unedited, uninterrupted from. The screen restoration and the sound are all perfect with this digital transfer, bringing out the intricacies in Amiel's framing, whilst that wonderfully anachronistic use of sound is more thrilling than ever... There are also a couple of documentary extracts from TV programmes at the time that look specifically at Potter the writer and his influence on the way television is/was shaping, as well as extracts from the points of view episode in which almost half of Britain complained about the almost endless onslaught of 'gratuitous sex, profane-humour, stark-violence and un-Godly behaviour'! Meanwhile the commentary track from the director and producer (Ken Trodd) respectively sheds some light on the controversy, as well as reflecting on Potter's passing, and the legacy of this great piece of work...