120: The Singing Detective (with Ted Mills) (Patreon)

The American writer and filmmaker Ted Mills, now living in Wellington New Zealand, joins the program for a discussion of the television playwright Dennis Potter’s greatest achievement, his 1986 series for the BBC, The Singing Detective.

One of the earliest examples of what we would now call “Prestige TV”, The Singing Detective was acclaimed for the breakout lead performance from Michael Gambon and for how it told a difficult story in a complex manner taking place over several planes of time, reality and fantasy. In 6 epsiodes, an unpleasant pulp novelist hospitalized with a ghastly and paralyzing case of psoriasis begins to put the pieces of his life together with the help of the hospital’s psychiatrist, starting to comprehend that his horrible mental and physical condition may be related to unresolved traumas from his childhood.

We talk about Dennis Potter as a tv playwright, critic and advocate for public television’s power to both entertain and emancipate the viewer, the controversies in the UK when the program first aired, the show’s positive portrayal of psychotherapy, the self-conscious blurring of autobiography and fiction in Potter’s work, and how the experimental structure of The Singing Detective influenced modern prestige TV like The Sopranos and Twin Peaks.

We also (briefly) discuss the (bad) American remake from the early 2000s with Robert Downey Jr.

The Singing Detective is currently available to view at the Internet Archive and on YouTube.

Follow Ted Mills on Twitter and Instagram and visit his website.

BBC advert for The Singing Detective (Jon Amiel, 1986)

Trailer for the American remake of The Singing Detective (Keith Gordon, 2003)