Michael Gambon’s greatest role? The Singing Detective revisited

I was very sad to hear the news that Sir Michael Gambon passed away aged 82 yesterday (Thursday 28th September). Reading the glowing tributes to him from friends, colleagues and fans, it seems that we all remember him as a fun, funny man always with glints of mischief in his eyes. As an actor, he was able to switch between booming anger and bitter cynicism to softly-spoken vulnerability at the drop of a hat.

And he had great links to crime drama, too. He played Maigret for two series in the early-to-mid 1990s, but it’s The Singing Detective that really stands out.

The six-part Dennis Potter drama aired in November and December 1986, and featured an incredible cast, many of them just starting their careers. Joanne Whalley, Imelda Staunton, Alison Steadman, Patrick Malahide, Jim Carter, David Thewlis, Ken Stott, Bill Paterson… the list goes on.

Upon hearing the news yesterday, I decided I’d binge The Singing Detective again, for the first time since I saw it during its initial run in 1986. I remember it to be one of my favourite TV shows ever, and I’m pleased that it retains that status after my binge rewatch in tribute to Gambon (although some of the language is a bit choice and, rightly, wouldn’t make the cut today).

It’s just astonishing, and Gambon is mesmerising. He won a BAFTA for his performance as detective novelist Philip E Marlow, and I actually do wonder if it’s his finest performance.

Michael Gambon and The Singing Detective

Writer and comic actor Charlie Higson asked on Twitter yesterday: “Very sad about Gambon. What a great and unusual actor he was. Why do we make no dramas like Singing Detective any more. Intelligent daring playing with the form and genres of TV. put me right if I’m wrong.”

I answered with the suggestions of Giri/Haji and I May Destroy You (two previous winners of The Killing Times’ Crime Drama of the Year), but Higson was right to ask the question. Even almost 40 years later, The Singing Detective looks and feels innovative almost without compare.

It interweaves narratives, characters real and false, and plays out almost exclusively in the mind of its main protagonist who lies in a hospital bed, unable to move. That the late, great Dennis Potter could construct three or four different narrative threads from this position and bring them all together in the end is a testament to his genius.

Who does Michael Gambon play in The Singing Detective?

The plot goes something like this: detective novelist Philip E Marlow is hospitalised due to an acute flare-up of skin disease psoriatic arthropathy, which leaves the skin flaking, scaly and pustilated, and his joints swollen and inflamed. This mirrored Potter’s own life-long battle with the condition.

The condition also often produces a high temperature and fever, and throughout the series Marlow hallucinates doctors and nurses singing songs from deep within his subconscious, almost always from his childhood, spent in the idyllic Forest of Dean. These songs often act as gateways to other parts of his subconscious. In his head, he rewrites one of his novels – the titular The Singing Detective set in London in the years immediately after the War – this time suffused with characters from his childhood, with himself as the detective. Marlow is a crooner in a club at night, and then a smart-talking, hardboiled noir PI by later-at-night (I don’t think we ever see him at work in the day). A murder case – a sex-worker-cum-spy is fished out of the Thames at Hammersmith – keeps him occupied. The songs also take us back to his childhood, where he witnesses one of his beloved dad’s mates from the village have sex with his frustrated mum in a clearing in the forest. That man – Mark Binney – becomes the villain in both The Singing Detective thread, and a modern-day thread that sees him play a slick London movie producer out to get him.

If this sounds complicated it is. I remember watching it as a 13-year-old and not knowing quite what was happening. I was, however, spellbound by the oscillating between the different threads and timelines, being enthralled by the noir story as well as emotionally invested in Marlow’s time in hospital, and the characters on the ward he interacts with (especially Whalley’s Nurse Mills and Paterson’s psychologist, Dr Gibbon). I was also scared – it was creepy and unhinged at every level. It was also very emotional and, it seemed to me even at that time, about guilt and loss, as well as the connection the young Marlow had with his parents.

Why was Michael Gambon so good in it?

At the heart of it all was, of course, Gambon himself. During his delirious moments in hospital, he hallucinated doctors and nurses singing Dry Bones, shouting obscenities at his ex-wife; and then in other scenes he was being suave and the kind of Philip Marlow that we already know and love from the Raymond Chandler novels.

As the finale episodes come into focus, Marlow finally processes his demons – his guilt and shame – and all of his realities bleed into one. For instance, we find out his mother took her own life by jumping into the Thames at Hammersmith, the same way in which a character from his reimagined Singing Detective novel did.

Reality and imagination intersect. No more so in one of the final scenes when the fictional Marlow seemingly kills the real Marlow in his hospital bed, deadpanning that he can now take care of himself.

“The point is that we do that in our heads all the time,” Dennis Potter said about the way the imagination is examined in The Singing Detective. “Some smell, some tune, some expression, the way a person walks…everything will remind you of something else you’ve had and lived through. Your mind is darting amongst what is in front of you – a man walking with a dog, the smell of meat from a butchers, an old lady’s hat, a small boy dropping an apple, the wind in your hair, snatches of a song heard through a bedroom window – and you are making connections with all that, setting off all kinds of emotions. All drama is so cumbersome compared to the agility of the mind to manipulate and control emotions, making sense of the vast complexity it is faced with at every moment. The more we remind ourselves of those two things – our complexity and the sovereignty within that complexity – the more likely we are to be free, no matter what the political system.

“With The Singing Detective, I’m aiming to employ the force of autobiography without being literally true. There’s various ways in which this is achieved, unlike Pennies, which was using one device to access the emotions. Although this one again uses songs, 40s material this time, it also uses the conventions of the pulp detective novel and the conventions of autobiography. Central to it all is the struggle of Marlow, the Michael Gambon character, who is humiliated and disfigured by his illness.”

It’s within this extraordinary premise that Gambon plays multiple characters.

I remember saying to myself in 1986 that I hadn’t seen anything like it before, and I’m still saying it almost 40 years later.

Paul Hirons

Listen to The Singing Detective playlist on Spotify.