The Singing Detective at 40: Remembering the iconic BBC drama with Michael Gambon

November 1986: I was in my first week as a sub-editor at Radio Times when some stunning cover artwork came round for approval. Everybody cooed, although none of us realised then that we were looking at what would become a classic cover, deftly evoking Dennis Potter’s TV masterpiece, The Singing Detective.

“It’s been a great calling card for me over the years,” says illustrator Mark Thomas, whose RT commission echoed the “pulp fiction” book jacket he’d already painted for the BBC series. “I always loved those lurid paperback covers from the 40s and 50s, and that style was chosen after the show’s director, Jon Amiel, saw a pulp pastiche I’d done for Penthouse.”

He recalls going on set at Ealing Studios and meeting lead actor Michael Gambon, who “looked pretty pooped but was very polite and patient” at the end of a day’s filming.

Gambon plays Philip Marlow, a cantankerous writer hospitalised with acute psoriatic arthropathy. In his delirium, he revisits his troubled youth and enters the fantasy world of his noirish novel, The Singing Detective. Dennis Potter insisted his work wasn’t autobiographical, while telling RT in 1986 that it was informed by his own life-long battle with the debilitating condition. “This story is about one man’s paranoia and the ending of it – his thoughts, his torments, his struggles. It’s strong stuff. It is in the interest of all writers to retain their power to shock.”

Shortly before broadcast, Mark Thomas remembers, “Jon Amiel contacted me to say the title sequence they’d filmed was disliked by Potter and asked if I could do some black-and-white drawings to go with my prop book cover to form the opening and closing credits. I had to work overnight but felt very flattered. My one misgiving was that the BBC didn’t feel I deserved a mention in the credits. Then it got a BAFTA for best graphics!”

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The show was up for 11 BAFTAs but won only three – 1986 had been a rich year for BBC TV, and The Life and Loves of a She-Devil took best drama. The great Gambon, though, did bag best actor. Despite the massive success of The Singing Detective Gambon didn’t consider it “popular television”, and reflected in 1992 to RT, “Like so much of my work, it was a bit posh, upmarket, intellectual. I put The Singing ’Tec with Galileo and A View from the Bridge, both at the National Theatre, as the only three things I’ve done properly; times I felt I filled the skin of the roles to the full.”

The Singing Detective had a striking cast: Alison Steadman, Janet Suzman, Patrick Malahide, Jim Carter, Imelda Staunton… many appearing in double or triple roles in Potter’s twisting narrative. Joanne Whalley, then 23, played Nurse Mills. “I remember laughing a lot,” she told RT in 2022.

“We were letting off steam because it was often very intense. Michael was a great one for pranks. In one tricky scene, I had to grease him up, and I was worried about how it would go. When it was time for the first take, I had to pull the blankets back – and Michael had had stockings sprayed onto his legs! I looked down and thought, ‘What is going on?’ Then I roared with laughter.”

Watched now, the series offers glimpses of several actors early in their careers. Then just 20, Sharon D Clarke played the Night Nurse, nodding off on duty in the hospital ward, but also featuring in one of the song-and-dance showpieces. Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters’ 1940s number Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive offers a message we can still heed all these years later.

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