Singing Detective, The - Vol. 1

From one of the great experimentalists of TV drama comes one of the greatest serials of recent years, a cunning and compellingly original tour-de-force which mingles fantasy and reality with the haunting hit songs of the 1940's. The award-winning The Singing Detective - acclaimed as Dennis Potter's masterpiece - is a dazzlingly entertaining and multi-layered mystery thriller with a distingished cast. Wracked by a terrible skin disease, the unsuccessful writer Philip Marlowe looks cynically back on life from his bed in a busy National Health hospital, fantasising himself himself into one of his own pulp thrillers as a crooning '40s detective enmeshed in a bafling murder case. But memories of his wartime childhood keep intruding - as do songs like "Blues in the Night", "Dry Bones" and "Cruising Down The River" . Unwillingly, Marlow agrees to talk to a psyhotherapist - and, slowly, the clues begin to add up. But to what? © 1986 BBC