The late Dennis Potter was a master at mining the popular songs of the 1930s and '40s for dramatic effect, but he never did it better than in The Singing Detective. The inestimable Michael Gambon plays a mystery writer named Philip E Marlow, who is suffering a torturous bout of psoriatic arthritis in hospital, where he is a victim of both his disease and the National Health Service. Unable ...
The mini-series treatment suits Doctor Zhivago, Boris Pasternak's sprawling novel of a Russian physician-poet whose comfortable life is upended by the revolution. And this near-four-hour Granada TV production lucidly demonstrates that Pasternak was one heck of a storyteller: the torment of Zhivago (Hans Matheson) as he must choose between his well-bred childhood sweetheart (Alexandra Maria ...