SOURCE: "The Singing Detective (Dennis Potter): Who Done It," in British Television Drama in the 1980s, Cambridge University Press, 1993, pp. 234-55.

In the following essay, Hunninger, Principal Lecturer in Film and Television Production at the University of Westminster, examines every aspect of the production of The Singing Detective to determine how it is able to represent "objective and subjective realities" in the extraordinary manner that he suggests it does.

Dennis Potter dislikes academic critics. In the preface to Waiting for the Boat: On Television, he wrote: 'It is no news that there is a contemptuous, hard-eyed hatred of humanistic culture all around us … the long, grey, ebb tide of so-named Post-Modernism, pseudo-totalitarian, illiberal and dehumanizing theories and practices lie on top of the cold waters like a huge and especially filthy oil slick … The Academic critic reigns, intimidatingly.

Understandably, I tread cautiously over this bridge shrouded in fog...