‘Singing Detective’: Mysterious Mosaic of Fantasy and Reality

The BBC television series “The Singing Detective,” which begins tonight on KCET (Channel 28, 10 p.m.), is not quite like any other series ever seen on land, sea or satellite.

Its nearest cousin is “Pennies From Heaven” from the daring and innovative hand of the same Dennis Potter. Now, as then, fantasy past, fantasy present and fantasy future blur with past and present reality, like images seen from a fast-moving train at twilight. And, as in “Pennies,” characters mime to pop records from their pasts, with effects that are sometimes bizarrely amusing and sometimes quite affecting.

The mixture this time is even richer, or thicker, than before because the central figure is a writer who makes his living turning real and imagined experience into a product and who in the end, like other writers, cannot always be sure where the real and the imagined part company.

Potter himself has suffered, evidently terribly, from psoriasis, the eruptive skin disease that in its acute stages can cause arthritis-like pain and paralysis and fatally high fevers.

As his protagonist, Potter has created a middle-aged writer named Philip Marlow (“No ‘e,’ but with a name like that what could you do except write detective stories,” he says) and he, too, is in hospital enduring a ghastly episode of psoriasis.

Marlow, in great pain, hardly able to move his head or anything else, is fighting--not always successfully--to hold on to his sanity.

One way and another, it sounds as unpromising and resistible a story premise as could be devised. The fine Irish actor Michael Gambon, in the makeup devised by Frances Hannon, is a fright to see, behind his scaly encrustations.

Potter and director Jon Amiel have obviously had to tread a very thin line between revulsion and sympathetic fascination, but by various means the fascination wins.

Raging at the doctors, the nurses and his fellow patients--and often being scathingly funny about it--Marlow becomes a hobbled Everyman with only the strength of his mind keeping him from total despair and, it is clear, from death itself.

When the going gets really rough (for Marlow and for the viewer), Potter cuts away to the thriller Marlow is writing, or possibly re-creating, in his head, or to the memories.

Marlow is himself The Singing Detective, a suave nightclub emcee complete with straw hat and cane, doubling on the side as a private eye who is all the sardonic, side-of-the-mouth American eyes put together. (It is relieving to see Gambon suddenly in florid good health in these fantasies.)

“The Singing Detective” has been a big paperback hit for him and it is not certain whether he is remembering or revising its plot, with its two femmes fatales, one or the other of whom is later fished from the river; its menacing villain, its lurking thugs, its cryptic allusions to foreign powers and state secrets.

Marlow’s memory drifts to an awful childhood in a colliery town with his stolid but loved miner father and his pretty, adulterous mother trapped in a wretched home life with her brutish in-laws.

The West Country accents are almost indecipherable and the boy Marlow is affectingly played by Lyndon Davies, his parents by Jim Carter and Alison Steadman.

The six-part series, which continues with two installments next Saturday, a fourth on Feb. 20 and concludes with the last two episodes on Feb. 27, is a kind of double mystery.

All the pieces of the foolish thriller-mystery fall into place, after a fashion. But the real interest and the true mystery is discovering how the incidents, the characters, the feelings, have all originated in Marlow’s real life. The theme is simply, or not so simply, the mystery of the creative process.

There is more to it than that, of course, and one of the astonishments of Potter’s phantasmagorical tale is just how much ground it covers. It is an indictment (clearly heartfelt) of the impersonality of ward care in a public hospital, with their martinet nurses and patronizing but essentially indifferent doctors. The nice nurse (Janice Whalley) is an angel by any standards.

“The Singing Detective” creates a kind of portrait in mosaic of Marlow himself that is finally impressive in its subtlety and depth, from the fantasizings of childhood to the hallucinatory alarms of the ward.

And Potter is at last talking about desperate courage and the will to survive, with a resolution (worth watching for) that is a good deal less bleak than the fate of Bob Hoskins in the original television version of “Pennies From Heaven” or Steve Martin in the movie.

Michael Gambon is not your typical leading man but he’s a fine, brave actor, surrounded by a skilled ensemble (the British do know how to mount these things) that includes Janet Suzman as his harassed wife and Patrick Malahide as a villain who may or may not be doubly a villain.

“The Singing Detective” is an incandescent display of the expository art, a linear story (finally) but one that proceeds as if by maze, diversion and contrapuntal detour and is, all in all, an amazement.