Karry Best movie of this year hands down!

Moustroll Good movie but grossly overrated

Limerculer A waste of 90 minutes of my life

Kailansorac Clever, believable, and super fun to watch. It totally has replay value.

werefox08 To put it simply---the best thing to be shown on television ..EVER. Dennis Potters The Singing Detective is six hours of exquisite brilliance. It has sex, humor, drama, action, detectives, whores, spies Etc. Etc........in fact everything that constitutes a great reason for looking into a square screen. This is tripping..but..without the chemicals. Some of Potters writing...or "his observations on humanity" are startling in there depth. This is a pure form of originality by an extremely complex man. Potters mind was always "on the boil"...how else could he come up with this electrically charged wonder of the last century ?? (1986). This is like the birth of a new star ...in a galaxy far far away. This is television gold, and plutonium. This is as good as T.V. has ever been (or will ever be). This is THE SINGING DETECTIVE.

pontifikator This is one of the two best mini-series I've seen.* It has excellent casting, excellent photography, even excellent sound. And the script, by Dennis Potter, is amazing. I'd say there are three or four master's theses in that script for those who are into such things. The series stars Michael Gambon, Janet Suzman, and Patrick Malahide as the major characters, but the supporting cast is one of the best I've seen."The Singing Detective" follows some days in the life of one Philip E. Marlow, the writer of cheap detective novels. Marlow has psoriasis, a skin disease that renders him incapable of motion, keeping him in constant pain and delirium. Marlow drifts in and out of cogency, and we follow his delirious dreams and waking life. In his dreams, Marlow has cast himself as the title character in his first novel, called -- wait for it -- "The Singing Detective." Because Marlow is truly delirious, we can't always tell when what we're seeing is actually happening and what is a part of Marlow's delusion. Interspersed with his delusions from the novel are flashbacks to Marlow's childhood in a rural English village, where his father was a coalminer. While Marlow is in the hospital, he's seen by various doctors, cared for by various nurses, and is seen by a psychiatrist. All of these seens (er, scenes) take on a life of their own, with some of the actors playing several characters. The issues Marlow is dealing with include whether his psoriasis is self-induced, the suicide of his mother (used in his novel "The Singing Detective"), his feelings about sexual intercourse, and his feelings about writing trashy novels instead of literature.Potter breaks down the usual wall between plays/movies and the audience by having his characters address the audience directly. In addition, the character Marlow, played by Gambon, plays the titular singing detective, Marlow's mother plays a German spy, and the actor Malahide plays more characters than I could keep track of. In the novel, a woman commits suicide by jumping off a bridge, and her face is revealed several times, but there are three actresses portraying the dead body, including Marlow's mother.Additionally, fictional characters from his novel interact with Marlow and other purportedly real characters from Marlow's purportedly real life. And two of the fictional characters step into meta-roles, addressing the fictionality of their existence, addressing the facts that they don't even have names and are there just to stand around. They confront the "real" Marlow and attempt to kill him, resulting in a gunfight in the hospital, where the fictional Marlow as the singing detective murders the "real" Marlow, his author. Potter had some very serious problems, and they tumble out helter-skelter in this mini-series.Dennis Potter was born in the Thirties and died in 1994 from panchreatic cancer. Potter hated Rupert Murdoch and named his fatal cancer Rupert. In 1962, Potter was diagnosed with psoriatic arthropathy, which not only caused horrible, debilitating lesions on his skin (worse than was shown on Marlow), but crippling arthritis. His hands were reduced to clubs, and he continued to write by taping a pen to his hand. It may be that the drugs used to treat his disease caused the panchreatic cancer.Potter has written about his sexual abuse by a relative when Potter was a child, and he seems to have been disgusted by sex the rest of his life. Although he denies his works are autobiographical, it's very clear he draws much of his writing from personal experiences. Several scenes in "The Singing Detective" show characters dealing badly with sexual intercourse.The series was directed by Jon Amiel, and he did a marvelous job. The music for the series was chosen from Thirties and Forties classics, and I recommend listening to the series with your best sound system.Potter also wrote the mini-series "Pennies from Heaven," starring Bob Hoskins, which I also recommend. "Pennies from Heaven" is darker than "The Singing Detective." I haven't seen the film version with Steve Martin. Some of the aggravation of Potter's writing the screenplay for MGM spills over into "The Singing Detective."*The other is "Tinker,Tailor, Soldier, Spy."

paul2001sw-1 About to watch the 'The Singing Detective' in its entirity for the first time in 18 years, one is filled with anticipation but also anxiety. Supposing it's dated, or that its once revolutionary nature has been so widely copied (one thinks here of its multi-layered structure, or the scene where Michael Gambon tries to avoid having an erection) that it will be impossible to remember quite how fresh it seemed on first viewing. Worst of all, perhaps it's simply not as good as remembered? When the piece started slowly, I feared that disappointment indeed awaited. But soon I fell again into its magical rhythmns, and, mesmerised, have just (with the aid of DVD) consumed the final five hours in a single weekend. Mesmerised but not surprised - the power of the piece is such that almost every scene, almost every line of dialogue seemed familiar. The last film I saw I had in fact seen previously, and much less than 18 years before, but I had forgotten it entirely and would not have even realised except for a one memorable detail. By contrast, in Dennis Potter's masterpiece, when a single scene failed to trigger recognition, it seemed horribly wrong, as every other incident was written on my brain.For those who don't know, 'The Singing Detective' is an offbeat musical about a writer in hospital, that weaves effortlessly his present experiences, his past fictions, his paranoid imaginings and, above all else, the memories of a childhood that to this day still dominates his life. Wildly imaginative, but grounded in Potter's own autobiography, it constitutes an enormously rich and vivid telling of a fundamentally very simple story. Potter celebrates life, but refuses to assign it any false dignity. The extent to which he strips away the cant that helps make life bearable is truly disturbing, and perhaps explains the reason the religious right wanted it banned. The cover of my DVD says 'moderate nudity; mild language; no violence' and by modern standards this is correct. Which only damns the moderns; but Potter knew truly how to shock.Put simply, everything is right about this series. The dialogue is caustic and hilarious; the direction spot on; the acting brilliant. The song and dance routines are coreographed precisely, economically, but to devastating effect. In fact, the construction of the whole work has the feel of jazz to it, the same themes repeated with minor variation, building to a whole that exceeds the mere parts. And the faces in this drama are the most wonderfully expressive faces you will ever see. I was going to call their expressiveness stylised, in that no-one's real face ever really gives away so much. But these, of course, are the faces of the memory, a lifetime's trauma captured in a single tearful eye.The cast clearly rose to the material. Gambon gives a virtuoso acting masterclass, supreme in both his roles (he plays both the writer and his creation); and though the writer undergoes a major personal journey during the course of this story, Gambon is as good at the end as at the start. While Joanne Whalley, Bill Paterson (with his beard and accent, he makes me think of Robin Cook!) and (in a virtually silent role) Jim Carter have never done anything better. Often overlooked, meanwhile, is the stunning performance from (the subsequently obscure) Lyndon Davies from as Gambon's younger self.Potter spent his entire career trying new ways of writing screenplays. It didn't always come off and after this work, little he produced was of merit. But 'The Singing Detective' hits no false notes. If there's been a better series made for television, I haven't seen it.

Judy Lewis Anyone who thinks television is only for the brain-dead should see this drama. Written by Dennis Potter,the most exciting writer to ever work for television, it is a multi-layered story of a writer hospitalised with a disabling skin disease, who retells the story of his most famous book (which is coincidentally being read by another patient), relives incidents from his childhood, imagines contemporary events and the people around him bursting into song. It is hard to describe, but it is sharp, funny, superbly intelligent and challenging - among the best six hours ever made for television.