MacGYVER YOUR ENTHUSIASM (19)
By:
March 5, 2025
One in a series of enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, analyzing and celebrating favorite TV shows from the Eighties (1984–1993). Series edited by Josh Glenn.
THE SINGING DETECTIVE | 1986
The femme fatales, drifters and gumshoes inhabiting the chiaroscuro margins of noir pulp rarely want to talk about themselves, let alone sing about it. That is, until The Singing Detective came along. This 1986 six-part BBC TV series is a gutsy noir memoir musical. Writer Dennis Potter (Pennies from Heaven) fractures the “usual suspects” detective narrative into a fever dream, scored with a jingle-jangle of 1940s showtunes.
Watching it decades later, the dazzle is still dazzling, but it is the story’s underlying directive that packs the sharpest punch. The series urges the viewer to crack the mystery of self — before it’s too late. What rotten things have you done in your past that still haunt you? Sure, the series is littered with clues, guns, dames and dead bodies, but the original crimes of childhood are tougher to solve than ones involving a bloody corpse.
Crime novelist Philip E. Marlow (Micheal Gambon) has a crippling skin disease which has him pinned, a grotesque carapace specimen, to a hospital bed. He is the potential corpse in this murder mystery. Question is, how did he get there? The pulp scenes he composes in his head are peppered with glib noir bon mots: “The doorman of a nightclub can always pretend it’s lipstick, and not blood, on his hands. But how did it get there? Let’s be economical, nothing fancy. If he’d smacked some dame across her shiny mug, then he’s got both answers in one.” Underneath the clever is the voice of Dennis Potter, who suffered from debilitating psoriatic arthropathy, and wrote between swigs of morphine.
Marlow transforms the hospital’s parade of patients, doctors, and nurses into choreographed bursts of lip-synced song and dance, including the apt tune “I’ve Got You Under my Skin.” As Marlow dislodges painful memories, inching towards self-awareness, his fever drops, and his skin begins to clear up. Detective heal thyself.
Marlow is an “unlikable protagonist” — by turns nasty, narcissistic, and too clever for his own good. All this unlikableness blossoms into a kind of beauty. One tender relationship in The Singing Detective is with the fetching Nurse Mills (Joanne Whalley), whose job it is to apply salve to Marlow’s flaky skin. One part of his anatomy rouses itself, humiliating Marlow even as his helpless tumescence pulls wry smiles from Nurse Mills. Her touch, and their awkward intimacy, is the sly heart of the tale.
MacGYVER YOUR ENTHUSIASM: INTRODUCTION by Josh Glenn | Michael Grasso on MAX HEADROOM | Heather Quinlan on MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000 | Mark Kingwell on CHINA BEACH | Judith Zissman on SANTA BARBARA | Adelina Vaca on TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES | Deborah Wassertzug on MOONLIGHTING | Josh Glenn on VOLTRON | Adam McGovern on A VERY BRITISH COUP | Alex Brook Lynn on STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION | Nikhil Singh on CHOCKY | Sara Ryan on REMINGTON STEELE | Vanessa Berry on THE YOUNG ONES | Dan Reines on GET A LIFE | Susannah Breslin on PEE-WEE’S PLAYHOUSE | Marc Weidenbaum on LIQUID TELEVISION | Elina Shatkin on PERFECT STRANGERS | Lynn Peril on THE SIMPSONS | David Smay on THE DAYS AND NIGHTS OF MOLLY DODD | Annie Nocenti on THE SINGING DETECTIVE | Tom Nealon on MIAMI VICE | Anthony Miller on ST. ELSEWHERE | Gordon Dahlquist on BLACKADDER | Peggy Nelson on SEINFELD | Nicholas Rombes on TWIN PEAKS | Ramona Lyons on ÆON FLUX
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