Graham Greene The Singing Detective is one of those great works 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, let alone a work for television; and it is this sense of genius that elevates this work above the comparatively "okay" likes of say, Cracker, Brideshead Revisited, and Prime Suspect et al. This is down to the fact that The Singing Detective is a work far greater 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 then we're on the right track, because this is one of Dennis Potter's most detailed narrative constructs. The story chronicles 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; constantly being carried along at every step by the combined genius of Potter's characters, the skillful and visually rich direction of Jon Amiel and that towering central performance from the brilliant Michael Gambon. The writing is truly ecstatic, 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 60's playwrights that anything you'd expect to hear on BBC 2. The story also has obvious political overtones, 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 those other hospital set political parables, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Britannia Hospital).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 to be considered simply for television. Now, thanks to the magic of DVD we have the chance to experience Potter's classic in its definitive unabridged, unedited, uninterrupted from. A truly great piece of work.

FlickMan Apparently this is a "cult" movie (OK, miniseries) like Rocky Horror or Repo Man. There's a small group of people who love it and think it's the greatest thing ever, while most of the world is blissfully unaware of its existence. A friend lent me a copy, and I really couldn't get into it. It's just too oblique. There's tons of stuff going on, on all sorts of levels, but somehow I didn't care. The production quality is mediocre at best, and the main character, Marlow, is not all that likable. There are some great moments -- like when the hospital doctors burst into a rousing rendition of "Dem Bones" -- but mostly it just meanders along, zig-zagging between past and present, reality and fantasy. If you want to watch a surreal movie, I recommend "Brazil" over this, any day!

david94703 I was the Hollywood equivalent of an army brat, fed and bred in the industry. My father brought a well-known TV show from radio to the new broadcast medium, and I appeared on it as an extra several times; my sister was once asked which she preferred, radio or TV, and thoughtfully replied that she found the pictures on radio prettier.I've always devoted a great deal of my free time, not to mention a whole lot of my should-be-working time, to the distractions of TV, and I have a long list of favorites: Ernie Kovacs, Bilco, Rawhide, Rocky and Bullwinkle, Rockford Files, Hill Street Blues, Homicide, Simpsons, Dinosaurs, Parker Lewis Can't Lose, Seinfeld, list far from complete. I got lots of enjoyment out of TV, but not much inspiration. I guess I always considered it entertainment for the masses, and I was a mass.Forest for the trees. I never even thought that TV should or could be an art medium until Dennis Potter came around. We all so needed him to have a decently lengthy career. When a artist dies with so much work obviously ahead of him, the world ends up deformed, missing obvious parts we can't describe but acutely sense the absence of.It's true, as the rough jmb3222 points out, that the industry was eager to put out anything with Potter's name on it after his death; it's true that the remaining, cobbled together oeuvre was by and large inferior to the Singing Detective. I'm grateful, nonetheless, to every hand and force that helped make them available to me, not the least of which, of course, was the raging drive of Potter's talent and his dedication to leaving as much behind for us as he could through the increasingly debilitating pain of terminal leukemia. What a guy!

lionel-libson-1 Dennis Potter's "Singing Detective" in its 1986 TV production, surpasses standard definitions of dramatic entertainment. It amazingly integrates cultural fragments and memories with unequaled acting performance(Michael Gambon), giving full-dimensional life and impact to a form pioneered by Joyce, but with a soul and involvement of the senses far beyond "Ulysses".Although it has a plus 6 hour running time, we are left with a desire to continue sharing the company of this incredibly complex man. No other book, movie, etc. has so completely affected me as a work of art.The visuals of this production perfectly match the "mindworld" of Marlow as he struggles with agonizing disease, childhood memories and the birth pangs of artistic creation.