The Singing Detective

The Singing Detective P.D Marlowe's dreams, hallucinations and imaginings play an important role in The Singing Detective. This is a six-episode film may be seen as a marking of the first time Dennis Potter dealt with illness in his work, although it is not as much an autobiography. "I felt myself being nudged into writing about the condition. Not what it's like to be ill, but what it's like to be a human being …

…previous forty years of post-war history, to the cynicism and diseased decline of the mid-eighties, in a changed world. This changed world, more and more within the drama, comes to parallel the paranoid, conspirational atmosphere of Marlowe's noir detective thriller. The train journey functions as an objective correlative for Phillip's own emotional rite of passage: his journey away from the security and integration of childhood. Therefore there is much symbology evident in Marlowe's childhood dreams.