PAUL ROMNEY Being well aware of the Dennis Potter mystique, and having fond recollections of his first TV play, which I saw prior to emigrating from the UK in 1966, I looked forward to this serial with great anticipation only to be sadly disappointed. It is a remarkable exercise in technical virtuosity, but its ethical content is minimal, by which I mean that it has little or nothing to say about the human condition.This does not mean that there are not brilliant and enjoyable episodes, but they remain episodes -- they do not add up to anything larger than the sum of the parts. My favourite episode is the Dickensian portrait of the sadistic schoolteacher in Part 4 -- marvellous writing, and a note-perfect performance by Janet Henfrey. Generally speaking, the acting is first-rate and the direction enjoyably deft. The selection of 40's hits is terrific, especially Crosby and the Andrews Sisters in "Accentuate the Positive." But it does not jell.In the last analysis, I'm reminded of H. G. Wells's parody of Henry James, quoted by E. M. Forster in Aspects of the Novel. In that instance I'm with James and against Wells, but as applied to The Singing Detective Wells's criticism is spot on.

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.

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!

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.