Sir Michael Gambon achieved his greatest TV recognition by becoming unrecognisable. In BBC drama The Singing Detective, he is hidden under a cosmetic second skin of suppurating boils, pustules and lesions, symptoms of the extreme form of psoriatic arthritis, an autoimmune condition that writer Dennis Potter lived with – and gave to Gambon’s character, mystery writer Philip Marlow.
Perfectly designed to showcase Gambon’s versatility, it was a triple role. The actor also portrayed – his big face and frame and large dark eyes more familiar in these sequences – Marlow’s fictional creation, a 1940s gumshoe, plus that character’s evening alter ego of a dance-club singer. The 1986 BBC One six-parter is regularly repeated and streamed – polling high in votes on television’s greatest programmes.
