Word: potters
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Potter was born, the same year as Marlow, into a poor family in the Forest of Dean, those sprawling West Country woods where young Philip spots his mother copulating. Potter moved to London, as his character does, was graduated with honors from Oxford, ran unsuccessfully for Parliament in 1964, then began writing teleplays. For half his life he has suffered from the same disease as Marlow, and must stay occasionally in the sort of hospital he lances so vigorously in the series. Potter insists that Detective is not autobiographical, "except for the illness, with which I'm overly, sickeningly familiar...
...sympathetic viewer feels that way too, tracing Marlow's life and fantasies like a truth-seeking gumshoe. "I wanted to make an odyssey," Potter says, "in which a man in extreme pain and anguish tries to assemble the bits of his life. That's the way you have to deal with physical pain, you know. You have to stand outside it and say, 'O.K., destroy me if you must, but I'm going somewhere else.' Those acute, extreme forms of illness almost force you to divide yourself between the suffering animal and the human being who has to moderate...
...fantasy Marlow is, remember, a singing detective. As he did in Pennies from Heaven, Potter scatters period songs to make ironic points. A quartet of doctors turns Fred Waring's Dry Bones into a sardonic production number; The Teddy Bears' Picnic plays over memories of a forest seduction. "No matter how sugary and banal they might be," Potter says, "old popular songs are in a direct line of descent from the Psalms. They're saying that the world is other than the thing around you -- other than age, other than sickness, other than death. These songs are chariots; they take...
...music is a psalm and, for Philip, a therapeutic balm. In the final shot of The Singing Detective, Marlow the writer is able to walk out of the hospital in the guise of Marlow the slick detective. "He's stopped lying there moaning and suffering," Potter observes, "ready to deal with the world as a detective would -- tough-minded and able to manipulate it." In the pain- streaked world of Dennis Potter, that counts as a happy ending: hero cured, beautiful woman on his arm, and Vera Lynn warbling We'll Meet Again in the tuppenny jukebox of his soul...
...Dennis Potter' s BBC serial about a writer lacerated by memory and fantasy, The Singing Detective, comes to a Manhattan movie house. On big screen or small, it' s a bloody masterpiece...