From The Singing Detective to Top Gear: Michael Gambon’s colourful TV career

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.

Michael Gambon in The Singing Detective, BBC One, 1986. Photograph: ITV/Allstar

While Gambon’s performance did not surprise anyone who had seen his theatre work, TV audiences may not have seen such award-winning brilliance coming. Until this breakthrough at the age of 46, the actor had seemed set to be a TV underachiever in comparison with his theatrical rank. Although bringing valuable visibility and income at the time, his co-starring role in The Borderers (BBC, 1968-70), set on the 16th-century frontier between England and Scotland, had little afterlife or career uplift.

Curiously, Gambon seemed to be channelling the feeling of playing second fiddle in The Other One, a BBC One sitcom screened in two series from 1977-79. Written by John Esmonde and Bob Larbey as a new vehicle for Richard Briers – one of the stars from The Good Life, also written by the duo – it starred Briers as confident, successful Ralph and Gambon as dull failure Brian, these opposites accidentally thrown together on holiday. The title referred to Brian’s inferiority complex towards Ralph, and may, for Briers and the writers, also have wryly referred to this show’s relationship to The Good Life. But, as Gambon had appeared with the then much more famous Briers on stage, “the other one” , he confided to an interviewer later, felt a fitting label for himself.

The Other One failed, leading to Gambon’s relatively low billing in a December 1985 seasonal treat for BBC Two viewers: a studio version of Alan Ayckbourn’s stage play Absurd Personal Singular, set at three successive Christmas Eve parties. Gambon, who had played the part in theatre, was the least telly-famous of a cast that included Prunella Scales, Maureen Lipman, and Geoffrey Palmer.

Earlier that year, he was cast in a rare lead TV role, as Oscar Wilde in BBC Two’s three-parter Oscar, about how the writer of The Importance of Being Earnest also became the author of The Ballad of Reading Gaol. It was a slightly uneasy performance, suiting Gambon’s Dublin roots but at odds with his vividly heterosexual presence (these days, there would be protests at such “inauthentic” casting). It was further hobbled by bizarre scheduling to coincide with a programme about a quite different Oscar: that year’s Academy Awards TV ceremony.

But, within a year, Potter, producer Kenith Trodd and director Jon Amiel had cast him as Marlow, the American success of The Singing Detective then leading to a movie career that made Gambon one of the relatively few actors to become a frontline star in cinema, TV and theatre.

Micheal Gambon in Maigret, ITV, 1992. Photograph: ITV/REX/Shutterstock

In what can be seen as another example of TV’s tendency to recast stars, Gambon’s most high-profile home-viewing role after Marlow was as another old-fashioned detective in a hat and overcoat: Georges Simenon’s Parisian inspector in Maigret (ITV, 1992-93). To the occasional irritation of directors and co-stars, Gambon could become visibly bored on stage and screen if he had ceased to enjoy a part and that was possibly the case by the second and final series.

However, the writer-director Stephen Poliakoff gave Gambon a more distinctive and memorable role as King Edward VII in The Lost Prince (BBC One, 2003), playing one of the kindlier members of a royal family depicted as emotionally dysfunctional.

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Michael Gambon in Fortitude, Sky, 2015. Photograph: Amanda Searle

Theatre’s loss, when difficulty learning lines caused retirement from stage, was TV’s gain, making Gambon more available and, with producers hoping to draw in the Dumbledore audience from his movie fame, in demand. Powerful late roles included the Arctic thriller Fortitude (Sky, 2015-18), as a dying wildlife photographer, and playing a Blairite civil servant in crime drama, Fearless (ITV, 2017).

Gambon also had a significant nonfiction achievement on TV. A skilled engineer and lover of planes (he held a pilot’s licence) and cars (keeping a packed garage), he took part in the Star in a Reasonably Priced Car segment during a 2002 edition of Top Gear. With health and safety rules possibly less strict then, the actor took a bend on two wheels at great speed, impressing then presenters Jeremy Clarkson, James May and Richard Hammond so much that that they named the corner Gambon in his honour.

For one section of the TV audience, that is Michael Gambon’s legacy. But for most he will be remembered flinching in pain, crooning seductively and sleuthing morosely in his three great performances in The Singing Detective.