This mini-series is often credited as one of the best ever made and that's for a good reason. A grand pastiche build around a writing of detective novels who ends up in the hospital suffering from a skin-disease and hallucinations, what follows is a story that moves around from a hospital comedy, to a satirical crime story, to snippets of the writers painful childhood, back to lipsynced musical numbers of early 20th century standards. What gives this series quality and breath are firstly the main character played by Michael Gambon, he plays the role of the highly intelligent, literate, quipping, self-hating writer to a T. He is totally believable as a character, he could walk straight out of some documentary or autobiography and some of the lines are certainly great: I don't understand the question because I seem to have regressed into a helpless, pathetic condition of total dependency, of a kind normally associated with infancy. The last time I experienced anything remotely like this was in my bloody pram, being poked and drooled over by slobbering cretins, who turned out to be escapees from the local loony bin. They thought they were *doctors* and *nurses*!  The second elements which in my opinion pushes this series into the territory of great art, is it's exploration of sin and guilt, which is somewhat like a breath of fresh air in a society that constantly glorifies sex. The writer like any normal human being sees sex very much as a dualistic act, he longs for sex, but is also disgusted by it. This works equally well, when nudity is juxtaposed next to death or we see copulation as a mechanical and shameful/uncomfortable act. As the series progresses we experience the building of trauma and neurosis through incidents in his childhood, the defense mechanism he puts up, he total pain and horror he experiences when he is confronted by his childhood demons, the story ends up on a note of redemption when the writer opens up a learns to forgive himself.