Rating: 
Summary: An Intense and Stunning Cinematic Experience
Review: I have never seen a film work its way into the mind as thoroughly as this one does.Dennis Potter, by running many different-but-strangely-connected stories at once, manages to create a symphonic tapestry of depth and meaning surrounding the most subtle of details. After watching a couple of episodes, things like a painting on a wall or a song in the background take on a powerful meaning that fluidly ties in to everything else. It is like reading James Joyce, except it makes sense. My only complaint is that it can be too much...attempting to watch multiple episodes in a row becomes painful after a while. It takes some time to digest each one. Even when confronted with a clock, some of my friends refuse to believe they are only an hour long. Still, I'm on my 4th viewing, and it keeps getting better...it really shows that you don't need a big budget, fancy effects, or name actors to do something incredible.
Rating:
Summary: Exhilirating, Thought-Provoking, a Masterpiece
Review: This 7-hour BBC miniseries will go down in history as one of the greatest dramatic productions for television, and it could never have been done on an American network. The themes, plot, and dialog are far too demanding of an audience. At once gripping mystery, stirring musical, and wrenching drama, this is the film you should see before the new theatrical version with Robert Downey, Jr. is released. The new version will likely be dumbed down, sped up, and eviscerated.
Rating:
Summary: Moving, Haunting, Disturbing, Exhilarating!
Review: I have not been able to stop thinking or talking about this series since I watched it. I made a ritual out of watching one episode every Friday night for six consecutive weeks, and found myself barely able to wait from one week to the next. The way Potter weaves the different elements of the story into a cohesive whole is simply magical. All of the superlatives in the other reviews are spot-on. This is a masterpiece, plain and simple.
Funny, heartbreaking, mesmerizing...I could go on and on. The cast is splendid (JoAnne Whalley is a knockout), but it's Michael Gambon who steals the show. Due to the character's illness, he moves very little, and so must rely on his incredibly expressive eyes and marvelous voice to convey Marlowe's feelings. No other actor comes close to the Great Gambon. Just watching him try to light a cigarette is excruciating. I'm almost afraid to see the Mel Gibson / Robert Downey film version, for fear that I will be sorely disappointed. Oh well, I always have my boxed set. In fact, I'm about to start my Friday ritual all over again, this time with my wife watching as well. I envy her- she's about to have a marvelous experience.
Buy this set, you will enjoy it for the rest of your days...
Rating:
Summary: A great work of art
Review: The great work of the only real master dramatist ever to have written for television, so far. All of his work should be available, from "Stand Up Nigel Barton" from the 60s through "Karaoke" and "Cold Lazarus", his last works, written when he knew he had about six months to live from pancreatic cancer. Dennis Potter was one of the last century's finest artists, a writer to compare with great dramatists of any century. No praise is too high for this work. It astonished me when I first saw it and continues to today. I join the chorus longing for a DVD edition.
Rating:
Summary: Unreserved Praise
Review: This is indeed one of the finest television productions ever filmed. I see that it is the property of Fox, so one would hope that a DVD is on the way, as the price for the taped set is exorbitant. Michael Gambon achieved deserved praise and fame for his brilliant, tour-de-force performance as Philip Marlowe (yes, that's rather an obvious pun, but the humor and wealth of ideas on display in this work in no way fall into that category). Director Potter had one of the truly eccentric, surreal and comic imaginations of the past 50 years. This masterpiece definitely falls under the heading, "MUST VIEWING." Hopefully, it will be far more accessible to the viewing public in the near future.
Rating:
Summary: dilo
Review: I rate this brilliant piece of work with at least TEN STARS. It should be offered as a DVD! NOW! Its nuanced psychological and noir sensibility is breathtaking, and certainly worth any university/film school's serious study of writing for filmmaking, whether it be for BBC or theatrical release...please elevate the viewing public with a DVD of this gem. I, for one, will purchase a number of them!
Rating:
Summary: this is the best miniseries that you have not heard of
Review: it is a shame that this appears to be a movie that is now hard to obtain, because IT IS SO GOOD. The story is of a man who has a very bad case of psoriasis and his experiences in the hospital, mixed with his writings of a detective novel, his childhood memories and some interesting hallucinations, complete with music! Absolutely this is so much fun to watch. (Our local PBS station used to run the film in its entirety on New Year's Day and it was a tradition to just sit there all day and watch it)- it is as good as everyone says, as long as you kind of have an off beat sense of humor, as I do.
Rating:
Summary: Transcends All Media
Review: If, like me, you're an American, be prepared for some shrinkage. The fact that this masterwork could never have been made in the USA is telling. And yet...even now a herd of Hollywood incubi (led by Mel Gibson) is attempting to "Americanize" this timeless cultural watermark. They will gut it for sleekness, tear up its vigorous roots, goose it with smarm and violence, inseminate it with smooth-faced homunculi. (This was tried once before. Remember "Cop Rock"? No?)... There is even a danger that this abortion could supplant the true, the real--that the pervasive stench of Gibson's folly will scare neophytes away from what could be the greatest cinematic experience of their lives. Please do your part! This BBC six-tape set (the video equivalent of a 6-hour orgasm) is your (our) best insurance that cinema's apotheosis is not wiped from memory.
Rating:
Summary: ACTUALLY I RATE THIS TEN STARS********** There!
Review: ...this is Potter's masterpiece and a work of genius. If you can find Potter's last BBC itnerview, with the BBC's top interviewer of artists, Melvyn Bragg, you will find your admiration for THE SINGING DETECTIVE reinforced by Potter's toweringly well-spoken farewell, his improvised sentences that marvels pf intelligence and dependent clauses that go on forever and at last nail themselves to uplifting periods. One would not get more out of this than if listening to a Shakespeare born today exploring his Hamlet under Bragg's questioning. I've now watched THE SINGING DETECTIVE three times, which is to say given it eighteen hours of my life, and it only gets better. I can at last follow every nuance and now know that the central theme, if I didn't know it before, is that the mystery writer wants to know WHO DID THE CRIME that resulted in his psychosomatic illness--and the answer is his mother, a redhaired Eve in the Garden of Eden, which is magnificently presented as the Forest of Deanm its nearby mining community filled with blinkered, blunted miners dying of coal dust--yes, I see the mining and the coal dust as subliminal underpainting about the Christian myth. And of course the densely boorish, grunting, piggish Devil who tempts her into adultery is cast as the suavely smooth-talking villain in Marlow's ongoing hallucinagenic mystery novel. Now Marlow sees his mother's sin repeated in his own redhaired wife, and so has himself become a cynic of Shakespearean size, chewing on his own leg so hard, spiritually, that he has himself become "a Job locked into the prison of my own skin." Michael Gambon's playing of Marlow rises above praise and becomes a benchmark performance by which to measure all acting. Well, and so on, and so on. Beg, borrow or steal this film. Meanwhile, pray that it be released on DVD with the Potter/Bragg interview as an extra. I've watched the interview three times, having taped it from PBS, and will watch it numberless times more as a touchstone of glowing strength for my own writing. Farewell, my lovely Potter.
Rating:
Summary: Fun with Psoriasis
Review: This is certainly one of the greatest movies I've ever seen. Dennis Potter intricately weaves the past, present, and a writer's dream world into a complex psycho-analytical thriller. Wonderfully acted, ingeniously conceived, it is a true masterpiece. A pity that it isn't better known in the states.
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