Best movie of this year hands down!

Best movie ever!

If you like to be scared, if you like to laugh, and if you like to learn a thing or two at the movies, this absolutely cannot be missed.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

To put it simply---the best thing to be shown on television ..EVER. Dennis Potters The Singing Detective is six hours of exquisite brilliance. It has sex, humor, drama, action, detectives, whores, spies Etc. Etc........in fact everything that constitutes a great reason for looking into a square screen. This is tripping..but..without the chemicals. Some of Potters writing...or "his observations on humanity" are startling in there depth. This is a pure form of originality by an extremely complex man. Potters mind was always "on the boil"...how else could he come up with this electrically charged wonder of the last century ?? (1986). This is like the birth of a new star ...in a galaxy far far away. This is television gold, and plutonium. This is as good as T.V. has ever been (or will ever be). This is THE SINGING DETECTIVE.

The Singing Detective is certainly one of the best things ever to be seen on TV. It certainly caused a stir in the UK at the time because of its explicit treatment of sexuality. The story certainly is multi layered and fascinating and the acting is superb down to really minor characters. Usually the success is attributed to Potters's writing. When you read the screenplay which was published by Faber & Faber you certainly read an interesting story (although somewhat influenced by DH Lawrence) but you are not as overwhelmed as you are when seeing it on screen. So from my point of view The Singing Detective is at least as much the product of Jon Amiel and the mesmerizing pictures he creates plus his direction of actors. I find it amazing that the beautiful Alison Steadman never became the English Catherine Deneuve.

I heard about this miniseries last year in the local newspaper. One critic wrote that it was the best thing ever to be showed in Television. After reading this i started researching and i finally bought (Directly from England) "The Singing detective" DVD. I believe i wasn't prepared at first to see "The singing Detective", because i thought it would be a regular mini, but i was wrong. After watching the first episode i realized that i had to watch it again because i didn't understand even one of the scenes in the first episode. After re watching it and reading some of the comments in this site i continued watching the rest of the episodes. I watched 6 hours straight of pure brilliance.I recommend this mini to everyone that can understand true artistic achievements.10/10

Still waiting for the feature film version with Robert Downey, Jr and Mel Gibson, I put on my VHS copy of this 80s version to check a few of my favorite scenes, and found myself watching all 6 hours over again. I sort of disagree with the reviewer on this page who thinks it's impossible to cram the plot into 2 hours - an equally intricate plot was successfully contained in the 90 minutes of Potter's "Dreamchild" - but I agree that it will be quite a feat if they succeed in capturing all the eminence of the TV version, though. Every part - even down to the minute one played by David Thewliss as a soldier on a train - is so excellently cast. Truth to tell, the tv version almost made me cry (as Marlowe finally does in his last session with the analyst). The beauty of Potter's complicated stories is that they build up from something that is really very simple - in this case, two episodes in Marlowe's childhood: his frustrated mother's suicide - later developed into endless spy and murder plots - and his betrayal of a classmate, Binney - who proceeds to haunt Marlowe's stories. Potter's point seems to be that this is all it takes to produce a writer (if these events are left untreated by psychiatry) and he is likely to be right.