Dennis Potter on The Singing Detective

Transcript

00:00This is the National Health Service as you've never seen it before. In a disused wing of a

00:06North London hospital, showbiz, sleaze and good medical practice have somehow become

00:11disturbingly intertwined. This is the filming of the latest all-singing all-dancing television

00:25serial by Dennis Potter. It's the unlikely tale of a writer of cheap detective fiction

00:30lying immobile in hospital suffering from an acute skin disease. To keep himself sane,

00:35he rewrites one of his early works in his head. Fantasy becomes mixed with reality.

00:41Dennis Potter himself spent long periods in hospital suffering from skin disease and arthritis,

00:46yet he says his work is not autobiographical. The Philip Marlowe in The Singing Detective

00:51is not, clearly not me. I've never written a detective story in my life. His marital

00:58relationship, for example, is not mine. His memory of his past is not my memory of my past,

01:05but I do use the present tense, so in the place to which it all returns, no matter whether it's

01:14the musical side of it or the detective story side of it or the paranoia side of it or whatever,

01:20is you're always coming back to a man in a hospital bed, enduring and trying to deal with

01:29psoriasis and arthritis. The director, John Amiel, is Dennis Potter's Busby Berkeley,

01:38the choreographer of his fantasies. His job is to make the twists and turns of The Singing

01:42Detective into memorable and comprehensible images. I think the viewers will find it so

01:48rich and so resonant that it's kind of like a roller coaster ride. You look at the course and

01:54you think, my God, how does the roller coaster ever get through that? But ride it and I think

02:00you'll just find it's exciting, exhilarating and hopefully a rewarding experience. It's

02:09scenery, it's imaginative, it's moving. I think it's the best thing I've ever read.

02:13Janet Sussman plays the leading lady in The Singing Detective, the scheming ex-wife of the

02:18crippled writer. I must say, for the first time in my experience, it's fairly long now, at the end

02:24of a two-day read of all six episodes, six 75-minute episodes, the piece ended. Whether he's

02:31embarrassed by it or not, I don't care. It's one of the things Dennis Potter has to accept.

02:35Spontaneous applause broke out from the cast, from everybody sitting around that table,

02:41which I've never, never experienced before. The songs in The Singing Detective, like those in

02:47Pennies from Heaven, are from the 30s and 40s. Music, no matter how banal it might be or how

02:53cheap it might be, how much drivel it might actually be conveying, literally, nevertheless

03:00becomes a chariot for those emotions that you were feeling at that time. So that the swiftest

03:10access that people have sometimes to something in the past is why they say, oh listen, they're

03:15playing our song.