The Singing Detective

In the last couple of weeks, L and watched the original series of The Singing Detective, something I had many times claimed was the best television ever created. With the recent golden age of television, perhaps there are better things out there, but I think The Singing Detective holds up. In a certain sense, it's a great exercise in psychoanalytic self-analysis, in which the symbols of protagonist Philip Marlow's fictional and imaginary worlds are symbolic representations of his inner life, created by, mostly, childhood trauma. It's also a lesson in the interweaving of narrative, and I still marvel at the complexity of these. It is rightly considered writer Dennis Potter's - who seems to have been a rightly messed up guy himself - masterpiece.