Skip to playerSkip to main contentSkip to footer
Tindle News
  • 05/06/2024
Dennis Potter on The Singing Detective
Transcript
00:00This is the National Health Service as you've never seen it before. In a disused wing of a
00:06North London hospital, showbiz, sleaze and good medical practice have somehow become
00:11disturbingly intertwined. This is the filming of the latest all-singing all-dancing television
00:25serial by Dennis Potter. It's the unlikely tale of a writer of cheap detective fiction
00:30lying immobile in hospital suffering from an acute skin disease. To keep himself sane,
00:35he rewrites one of his early works in his head. Fantasy becomes mixed with reality.
00:41Dennis Potter himself spent long periods in hospital suffering from skin disease and arthritis,
00:46yet he says his work is not autobiographical. The Philip Marlowe in The Singing Detective
00:51is not, clearly not me. I've never written a detective story in my life. His marital
00:58relationship, for example, is not mine. His memory of his past is not my memory of my past,
01:05but I do use the present tense, so in the place to which it all returns, no matter whether it's
01:14the musical side of it or the detective story side of it or the paranoia side of it or whatever,
01:20is you're always coming back to a man in a hospital bed, enduring and trying to deal with
01:29psoriasis and arthritis. The director, John Amiel, is Dennis Potter's Busby Berkeley,
01:38the choreographer of his fantasies. His job is to make the twists and turns of The Singing
01:42Detective into memorable and comprehensible images. I think the viewers will find it so
01:48rich and so resonant that it's kind of like a roller coaster ride. You look at the course and
01:54you think, my God, how does the roller coaster ever get through that? But ride it and I think
02:00you'll just find it's exciting, exhilarating and hopefully a rewarding experience. It's
02:09scenery, it's imaginative, it's moving. I think it's the best thing I've ever read.
02:13Janet Sussman plays the leading lady in The Singing Detective, the scheming ex-wife of the
02:18crippled writer. I must say, for the first time in my experience, it's fairly long now, at the end
02:24of a two-day read of all six episodes, six 75-minute episodes, the piece ended. Whether he's
02:31embarrassed by it or not, I don't care. It's one of the things Dennis Potter has to accept.
02:35Spontaneous applause broke out from the cast, from everybody sitting around that table,
02:41which I've never, never experienced before. The songs in The Singing Detective, like those in
02:47Pennies from Heaven, are from the 30s and 40s. Music, no matter how banal it might be or how
02:53cheap it might be, how much drivel it might actually be conveying, literally, nevertheless
03:00becomes a chariot for those emotions that you were feeling at that time. So that the swiftest
03:10access that people have sometimes to something in the past is why they say, oh listen, they're
03:15playing our song.

Recommended

2:39
Up next
The Singing Detective - Dem Bones Clip (Englisch)
Moviepilot
10/11/2020
10:30
The Singing Detective S01 - Ep05 Pitter Patter -. Part 02 HD Watch
warrensniders64ket72
23/10/2018
5:26
SCARECROW scene – 'The Singing Detective' BBC TV series (Episode 6, 21 Dec 1986)
Costas
02/10/2015
4:58
The Singing Detective - Hospital Evangelists Clip (Englisch)
Moviepilot
10/11/2020
59:00
The Singing Detective S01 - Ep05 Pitter Patter - Part 01 HD Watch
warrensniders64ket72
27/09/2018
10:16
Top 10 Funniest Nude Scenes
WatchMojo
16/11/2024
2:43
The Singing Detective Movie CLIP - Let Go, Kitty (2003) HD
Cool mind fun
06/10/2022
45:57
Blackeyes (1989) - S01E02 - Dennis Potter / Gina Bellman / Nigel Planer
OldTVShow
19/11/2021
0:34
True Detective S03E07 The Final Country
Teaser Trailer
15/02/2019
1:02:21
UK S03E01
Logtube
02/01/2025
0:57
TT star Peter Hickman talks about his favourite bikes
Tindle News
29/05/2024
1:48
True Detective Season 4 Night Country (2023) Jodie Foster HBO series
TV Shows Promos
13/04/2023
1:49
Detective Inspector Jamie Tomlinson interview
Tindle News
02/02/2023
1:34
True Detective - Tráiler
FilmAffinity
01/06/2020
1:48
True Detective: Tierra nocturna - Teaser subtitulado
FilmAffinity
19/04/2023
0:48
True Detective : Hunters in the Dark (S3EP6)
Tele-Loisirs.fr
04/01/2022
1:49
True Detective: Tierra nocturna - Teaser oficial 2 subtitulado
FilmAffinity
27/09/2023
0:40
The Good Detective Saison 1 - Teaser #3 (KO)
BetaSeries
23/12/2021
0:55
The Good Detective Saison 1 - Teaser #1 (KO)
BetaSeries
23/12/2021
0:58
True Detective S01EP07EP08
Tele-Loisirs.fr
05/01/2022
1:56
True Detective: Night Country - Official Teaser 2 Max
FilmAffinity
27/09/2023
1:09
True Detective S01EP03EP04
Tele-Loisirs.fr
05/01/2022
2:14
Detective Vs. Sleuths | The -Making-Of: Sean Lau
Cinema Online Singapore
18/07/2022
1:01
Dennis Waterman dies
Bang Showbiz
08/05/2022
1:00
Detective Vs. Sleuths | Trailer 2
Cinema Online
29/06/2022