One Season Wonders: The Singing Detective Has Been All but Lost to Time
Photo Courtesy of BBC
In the years before streaming, extremely niche TV shows faced uphill battles against cancellation. As a result, TV history is littered with the corpses of shows struck down before their time. In One Season Wonders, Ken Lowe revisits one of the unique, promising scripted shows struck down before they had a chance to shine.
Every now and then I will remember something I saw on TV, some strange show at a random time, usually involving monkeys in off-beat cartoons. Fortunately, I live in an age when you can figure out whether almost every fever dream you had on a Saturday morning or at 3 a.m. on cable while on a cross-country family road trip was a hallucination of yours or an actual thing that was actually broadcast. The Internet, and streaming video in particular, has made even the most obscure works of broadcast art discoverable once again. Those of us pushing or past 40 years old can be assured that no, Twin Peaks really did exist (I am assured that it can’t hurt you).
If you want to watch The Singing Detective, though, prepare to either pay through the nose to buy the DVD from individual resellers or just watch the thing on YouTube courtesy of some random person (for now!! Who knows if it’ll get copyright claimed??). Besides being one of the most well-regarded television dramas ever, it’s also a showcase for the acting chops of Michael Gambon, now known to generations as the guy who stepped up to play Dumbledore in the Harry Potter films after the death of Richard Harris. (Imelda Staunton, Dolores Umbridge herself, also appears, because the U.K. is a peculiar little island with a limited casting pool.)
Incorporating autobiographical elements from writer Dennis Potter, the six-part season of 70-minute episodes is not what you expect, no matter what you go in expecting. Airing in 1986, it was a television event that probably confused and terrified a generation of British children. It is several layers of surreal all at once, to the point where you can’t be certain what is “real” in the fictional world of the story—even characters who are clearly grounded in the narrative as being part of the miserable real world occasionally interact with the imaginary phantoms in the mind of the wretched, bed-bound writer Philip Marlow (Gambon, whose character dryly remarks on his mother’s cluelessness in naming him after one of literature’s most famous private eyes).
One Season Wonders is usually about shows that were cruelly canceled. In this case, The Singing Detective strains my definition: it was a limited series. But it deserves mention because it isn’t even that old, and it is obnoxiously difficult to find on this side of the pond. It left such an impression that Robert Downey Jr. starred in a 2003 film adaptation which I somehow never heard of when it was released. I have barely heard it spoken of today from people referencing landmark TV. It may not have been canceled, but it’s a poster child for the complete lack of preservation performed by media companies who seem fixated on absorbing monthly streaming fees while providing as little service to the art form itself as possible.
The Show
Marlow is a washed-up mystery writer whose works are mostly out of print. We’re introduced to him as he lies, miserable, in a hospital with an autoimmune condition that has rendered the skin all over his body hideous, and immobilized his joints with painful swelling. He’s an invalid, and making it everyone else’s problem. The show spares us no humiliating detail: he’s not able to grease up his body with medicating salve, and the nurse obliged to do it for him keeps giving him a boner. There are multiple scenes about this, just as there are multiple scenes dealing with Marlow’s boyhood memories about taking a shit on his teacher’s desk and pinning the crime on a classmate, and about his mom banging a stranger in the woods while unaware her son is watching them.
Interspersed with these often surreal memories are stretches where Marlow seems to be fantasizing about a book he wrote, his most famous work: The Singing Detective. The detective in the book, also named Marlow, is the vocalist for a 1940s nightclub band, a private eye who wears out his shoe-leather when he’s off the clock. Gambon relishes the role, laying on all the hardboiled noir narration as thick as possible. In the fiction within Marlow’s head, there’s been a chilling murder. A woman’s body has been pulled out of the Thames, and the last man to see her alive hired her services at an underground club where call girls are paired off with their Johns. Marlow suspects the joint is actually a place where Soviet and Western spies are vying for the services of ex-Nazi rocket scientists.
Don’t hold your breath waiting for the conclusion, though! It’s not about that! It is about the aforementioned weird memories, and about Marlow’s paranoia as his estranged wife visits him with news that his old book is being optioned for a film adaptation.
The Singing Detective lingers (and lingers, and lingers) on Marlow’s tortured past for longer than is strictly necessary. You get the impression the six-episode run could’ve been shortened or that the individual episodes didn’t need to be as lengthy. At the same time, though, it is the source of some absolutely unhinged surrealism. With his childhood falling during the closing days of the second World War, the victorious attitude of the U.K. forms the dissonant backdrop of young Philip’s familial troubles. His mother is leaving his father and moving him out to some place in the country where he doesn’t fit in, all while he fails to understand what is going on. The present-day Marlow reflects on the fact his mother drowned (it is implied to have been a suicide) and genuinely seems not to have made the connection to the victim in his novel.
