Detective without a clue

This tale of a pulp writer hospitalised with an extreme case of psoriasis, and tormented in his delirium by the confusion of his fictional world and his childhood, is, like much of the late Dennis Potter's work, a high-stakes wager on both the tolerance and the imagination of its audience.

The effect is like seeing Sigmund Freud's head grafted on to the body of a crooner, and then the disturbing chimera singing you a ditty about sexual repression while tap dancing. You must be prepared to go with the flow and abandon yourself to a torrent of silliness, in the hope that you will be washed up on a rock of fundamental integrity.

The original television version of The Singing Detective had a leisurely six hours within which to save its audience from drowning in the bathos; the new Hollywood version has a mere 108 minutes. The original had a magisterial Michael Gambon getting a shameful, but wholly understandable, hard-on as Joanne Whalley lubricated his sores week after week; the new film gives us rehabilitated Robert Downey Jr being greased once or twice by a pert and pretty Katie Holmes.

You might have thought that with his own thin skin and redoubtable pathology Downey would be perfect as Dan Dark, the eponymous antihero, a man whose misogyny is tempered only by his misanthropy, and whose whole-body pizza complexion reflects his openly wounded psyche. But despite all his sweating and shouting, he never manages to convince us that he is seriously ill - a big problem for a piece where the disease is as much the star as its victim. Downey is miscast, his character is meant to have been a boy in the 1950s, and yet here we are in the present day without him looking much over 40. If director Keith Gordon wanted us to go with his flow, he needed to at least provide us with the buoyancy of good continuity.

That and perfectly segued lipsynch sequences. The Potter schtick of having awkward reality lift off into singing surrealism has been much copied over the years, and for it to work it has to appear effortless; unfortunately, from the very moment when a gaggle of doctors break into Fifties doo-wop, and the walls of the hospital room peal away to reveal a hellish realm of copulating dancers, we know that it isn't going to work.

But the problem lies with the script, as well as the acting and direction. Potter himself essayed a film-length version, but this has been run through the rewrite wringer. In place of Potter's moody wartime England we're given an off-the-peg evocation of 1950s noir. In place of the angry - implicitly anti-Thatcherite - tirade that was The Singing Detective's signature tune in 1986, we're given the generic Generation Xer's nihilism of the Noughties. And then there is Mel Gibson.

In fairness, his performance as Dr Gibbon, the psychotherapist who brings Dan Dark back from the edge, wasn't that bad. In fact I didn't even realise it was Mel Gibson at all. Result. However, while I didn't know Gibson was Gibbon, I didn't for a second believe that Gibbon was a credible shrink, what with his flip inspiration and his cod word association. The relationship between the two characters needed an intensity and a level of social disaffection that neither actor could summon up.

I make no apology for recalling Potter's television version quite so much as I have. While for a younger audience the resonances will not be present, for those of us who saw The Singing Detective in 1986, the prospect of Hollywood mauling his work again was a dispiriting one. Potter was a kind of British national television bard, and he is remembered as much for his Socratic death - swigging Brompton's cocktail with terminal cancer, while badmouthing Rupert Murdoch to Melvyn Bragg in a TV interview - as he is for his dramas. Yet the life and the work were always the same thing, and shorn of the playwright's unifying personality, and his notoriously meticulous direction, this singing detective is warbling in the dark.

Near the end, Dan Dark says of detective stories: "They provide more clues than they do solutions." And this is true of the film itself. Instead of the steady convergence of fantasy and reality that we had in the original, we are left with characters literally running around in search of an author - never a good sign. It is a great shame, Potter's Pennies From Heaven had the la-la treatment in 1981, with the haunting intimacy of the fantasy sequences hauled right over the top. Now The Singing Detective has met a different - but not dissimilar - fate, I suspect we will have to wait another 20 years before anyone dares to have another go.

The Singing Detective
Cert: cert15