A first level of narrative centers on Marlow in his hospital bed. Set in the present. this narrative includes his fantasies and hallucinations. The second narrative is played out in Marlow's mind as he mentally rewrites his story The Singing Detective, with himself as hero, set in 1945. The third narrative. also set in 1945, consists of memories from his childhood as a nine-year­ old boy in the Forest of Dean and in London. told through a series of flashbacks. The fourth area of narrative involves Marlow's fantasy about a conspiracy between his wife, Nicola, and a supposed lover, set in the present.

     There are obvious parallels between the story and Potter's own personal history. Like Marlow, Potter was born and brought up in the Forest of Dean at about the same time that Marlow was a wartime evacuee, and like Marlow he stayed in Hammersmith with relations who had difficulty with his strong Gloucestershire accent. Two key incidents in The Singing Detective are based on real-life  childhood  incidents-Potter's mother, a pub pianist, being kissed by a man, and Pot­ ter's writing a four-letter word on the blackboard when his precocious facility as a young writer made him unpopular with other schoolchildren.

     The serial is explicitly concerned with psychoanalysis: the spectator is constructed both as detective and as psychoanalyst in a drama that Potter described as "a detective story about how you find out about yourself." The text is rich in Freudian imagery and symbolism, and it deals with psychoanalytic technique as Dr. Gibbons attempts to involve a linguistically skeptical Marlow in the talking cure. Marlow's neurosis and paranoia are explicitly linked to his repression of painful childhood memories, notably his mother's adultery, her eventual suicide, and the mental break­ down of a fellow pupil after a beating by a te acher. At this level, for Potter the story was about "one man's paranoia and the ending of it."

     However, The Singing Detective does not offer a straightforward case of autobiographical drama-Pot­ter claimed the serial was "one of the least autobiographical pieces of work I've ever  attempted"-nor does it lead to conventional psychological or psycho­ analytical resolution. Potter translates basic concerns, instead, to a more complex level where the narrative and generic dimensions of the text endlessly merge and overlap, fusing past and present, fantasy and "real­ity," challenging the organic conventions of realist drama and mixing the stabilities of popular television with the textual instabilities of modernism and postmodernism.

     The Singing Detective is thus not only the serial that the TV viewer is watching but also the fiction that Marlow is rewriting in his head. Although his name is not unfamiliar in the genre, Marlow is no conventional focus for identification: he is obstreperously unlikable and contradictory, and his illness has been hideously disfiguring. More importantly, he is sometimes not the major "focaliser" of the narrative at all, being repeat­edly displaced by other themes and discourses in the process of a drama in which "character" itself rapidly becomes an unstable entity. The same character, for example, can appear in different narratives, played by the same actor; characters from one narrative can appear in another; a character may lip-synch the lines of another character from a different narrative; or, in true Brechtian-Godardian style, characters may feel free to comment on their role or to speak directly to the camera.

     Questions of time and its enigmas, past and present. are also rendered complex. In narrative I. in the present, Marlow is reconstructing two pasts: the book he wrote a long time ago, which was itself set in the past. and a part of his childhood. also set in 1945. The main enigmas in his text are set in that year. In narrative 2. who killed the busker. Sonia. Amanda. Lili. and Mark Binney? And why? In narrative , who shat on the table? Why did Mrs. Marlow commit suicide? Although narratives I and 2 usually (but not always) follow story chronology. in narrative 3. it is not really clear what the actual chronology of the young Philip's life might be. In terms of narrative frequency, The Singing Detective is further marked by a high degree of repetition-of words, events. and visual images-as the same event. or part of it, is retold, reworked, or re­ contextualized.

     The final shoot-out in the hospital thus merges narratives I and 2 by uniting the past ( 1945) with the present time of its reconstruction (1986), that is, its reconstruction in Marlow's head rather than in his book itself. The "villain" who is killed is not just one of the characters but also the sick author himself, thus liberating the singing detective and ensuring an ending for narrative 2. Although it does not resolve any of the enigmas posed by this second narrative, the "dream" of the "sick" Marlow allows the Marlow who is "well" to get up and walk out of the hospital, concluding narrative I. As he walks away down a long corridor on Nicola's arm. bird sounds from the Forest of Dean (narrative 3) are heard; past and present are again combined, even if, typically, they are not reconciled.

     The Singing Detective thus refuses any simple read­ing, and it even contests the traditional definition of television "reading" altogether. It is witty, comic, and salacious yet also savage, bleak, and nihilistic. It is blunt and populist yet arcane and abstrus. Its key themes are language and communication; memory and representation; sexual and familial betrayal and guilt; the transition from childhood to adulthood; the relationships between religion, knowledge, and belief; and the processes of illness and of dying. While its themes are resonant, its most enduring claim on critical attention lies in its thoroughgoing engagement with the textual politics of modernism. Its swirl of meanings and enigmas render it British prime-time television's most sustained experiment with classic post-Brechtian strategies for antirealism,  reflexivity, and  textual  deconstruction and for the encouragement of new read­ ing practices on the part of the TV spectator.