The Books of My Life: The Singing Detective

Film and Television Studies academic Glen Creeber seems to have carved out an academic career, in part, by writing about Dennis Potter, the author of the highly regarded BBC television shows Pennies From Heaven (1978) and The Singing Detective (1986). The bibliography of Creeber's book The Singing Detective (London: BFI, BFI TV Classics series, 2007), in fact, lists four other books and articles Creeber has published on the Gloucestershire born Potter.

In his monograph on Potter's The Singing Detective, Creeber reprises the much made criticism of auteur theory, the notion that there are some film and TV authors, that such an approach doesn't take into account the fact that film and TV are collaborative media. The fact of the matter, however, is that Movie critic and University of Warwick academic Victor Perkins argued as long ago as 1972, in his book Film as Film, that film was indeed a collaborative medium but that in some instances the director acted as conductor of a film bringing all of its plot, narrative, and mise-en-scene aspects of a film together just as a conductor brings together the score and all the instruments of an orchestra in a performance of, for example, Mahler's First Symphony. Somewhat ironically, Creeber goes on to argue, after giving us his auteurist straw man, that while a number of people--costumers, editors, directors of photography, set designers, and so on--contributed to the making of The Singing Detective, Potter and the director Jon Amiel were the primary auteurs of the serial, a perspective not dissimilar to that of Perkins.

In The Singing Detective Creeber argues that Potter's serial is a complex array of discourses: Christian, romantic, psychoanaytic, generic (a hybrid of the musical, the musical comedy, the detective story, film noir), semiotic, modernist, and post-modernist. Fascinatingly, Creeber's book likewise is a compex array of discourses: Christian, romantic, psychoanalytic, generic (a hybrid of the musical, the musical comedy, the detective story, film noir), semiotic, modernist, and post-modernist. Creeber's book is such a dialogical hybrid, in fact, that it is sometimes difficult to ascertain whether Creeber is arguing that Freudian psychoanalysis is transcendental, is a Bergerian social and cultural construct that has taken on a cultural life in the post-late 19th century West, or both. And while Creeber has interesting things to say about the Freudian aspects of The Singing Detective I was more convinced that at its heart Potter's work was more a pilgrim's progress and a paradise lost and refound, and more a critique of Calvinist theodicy, than a Freudian tale of therapeutic salvation.

In the end what Creeber's monograph on The Singing Detective, a serial I very much enjoyed when I first saw it in the 1980s, pointed up to me again is that most books on film and television shows simply aren't as entertaining, moving, and thought provoking as that which they are trying to interpret. I found Creeber's monograph to be, despite an attentiveness to the religious dimensions of Potter's work, pretty much standard, one might even say generic, film and TV criticism by a film and television academic embedded in a fin-de-siecle socially and culturally constructed academic film culture.