Hellen I like the storyline of this show,it attract me so much

Mjeteconer Just perfect...

ShangLuda Admirable film.

Pacionsbo Absolutely Fantastic

Thorsten-Krings The Singing Detective is certainly one of the best things ever to be seen on TV. It certainly caused a stir in the UK at the time because of its explicit treatment of sexuality. The story certainly is multi layered and fascinating and the acting is superb down to really minor characters. Usually the success is attributed to Potters's writing. When you read the screenplay which was published by Faber & Faber you certainly read an interesting story (although somewhat influenced by DH Lawrence) but you are not as overwhelmed as you are when seeing it on screen. So from my point of view The Singing Detective is at least as much the product of Jon Amiel and the mesmerizing pictures he creates plus his direction of actors. I find it amazing that the beautiful Alison Steadman never became the English Catherine Deneuve.

Roger Noël Smith It is Dennis Potter's imaginative and intelligent use of the technical possibilities provided by television - combined, of course, with the deep humanity of his vision - that marks The Singing Detective as a uniquely brilliant work.His ground-breaking technique is the moving between separate levels: the present of the patient Philip in the ward, the past of his childhood experiences that is so ever-present in his memory and so influential on him as an adult, and the world of his imaginary detective story that in turn derives its own inspiration and motivation from those problems of the past. The result is a breadth and depth of analysis of a man's life, including the impulses of the creative process itself, that has never been matched on television, at least to my knowledge.And it is beautifully, hauntingly, filmed and soundtracked.

cubpilot54 Episode one, if it can truly be identified as such, was enough to drive me away from the rest of the DVD. The plot is convoluted, confusing, frequently silly, and appears to be going noplace. After all, who needs to see the same scene (a body pulled from the river)three, or was it four, times? . After sixty or seventy minutes there was still no substance to characters or plot, nor a single person I would care to spend another ten minutes watching, nor any indication that things would improve (especially Mr. Gambon's skin condition). There was so much filler just to use up air time (?)...skin rubs, Physician's rounds, hospital ward banter, etc., that the main story line was neglected for minutes on end. Finally episode one ended, I slipped the DVD back into its sleeve, settled down with a good book. Hmmm...wonder wher I can sell a mint condition set of "Singing Detective" DVDs?

kaaber-2 Still waiting for the feature film version with Robert Downey, Jr and Mel Gibson, I put on my VHS copy of this 80s version to check a few of my favorite scenes, and found myself watching all 6 hours over again. I sort of disagree with the reviewer on this page who thinks it's impossible to cram the plot into 2 hours - an equally intricate plot was successfully contained in the 90 minutes of Potter's "Dreamchild" - but I agree that it will be quite a feat if they succeed in capturing all the eminence of the TV version, though. Every part - even down to the minute one played by David Thewliss as a soldier on a train - is so excellently cast. Truth to tell, the tv version almost made me cry (as Marlowe finally does in his last session with the analyst). The beauty of Potter's complicated stories is that they build up from something that is really very simple - in this case, two episodes in Marlowe's childhood: his frustrated mother's suicide - later developed into endless spy and murder plots - and his betrayal of a classmate, Binney - who proceeds to haunt Marlowe's stories. Potter's point seems to be that this is all it takes to produce a writer (if these events are left untreated by psychiatry) and he is likely to be right.