The Singing Detective (1986)

The masterpiece, and the best place to start. Six episodes on BBC1 on Sunday nights in late 1986, with Michael Gambon as Philip Marlow, a blocked mystery writer stuck in a hospital bed with acute psoriatic arthropathy, the skin and joint disease Potter himself lived with. Marlow's fevered mind tangles three strands: the detective plot he keeps reworking in his head, his childhood in the Forest of Dean, where Potter was born and the serial was filmed, and the ward around him. Running through all of it, characters lip-sync 1930s and 1940s songs in surreal musical numbers. It sits 20th on the BFI's 2000 list of the greatest British television programs.