Dennis Potter

Dennis Christopher George Potter (17 May 1935—7 June 1994) was a controversial British dramatist who is best known for several widely acclaimed television dramas which mixed fantasy and reality, the personal and the social. He was particularly fond of using themes and images from popular culture.

Potter was born in the Forest of Dean, Gloucestershire. His father was a coal miner in this rural mining area between Gloucester and Wales. During his National Service he learned Russian at the Joint Services School for Linguists. He won a scholarship to New College, Oxford, and started work for the BBC in the late 1950s, later writing sketches for That Was The Week That Was. He also worked as a journalist and considered becoming a Labour MP – unsuccessfully standing for Hertfordshire East in the 1964 general election, and claiming that by the end of the campaign he was so disillusioned with party politics that he did not even vote for himself – before embarking on his career as a television playwright.

Television work

Potter's career as a playwright began conventionally enough with works like "Vote, Vote, Vote for Nigel Barton" (The Wednesday Play, 1965), a BBC play about a parliamentary candidate, based on Potter's own experiences as such. He took a major step into controversy with "Son of Man" (The Wednesday Play, 1969), starring Irish actor Colin Blakely, an alternative view of the last days of Jesus, which led to his being accused of blasphemy.

His 1971 serial Casanova was criticised for its sexual content. Another play, Brimstone and Treacle (Play for Today, 1976), was withheld by the BBC for many years due to concerns over the depiction of the rape of a disabled woman. It was eventually broadcast on BBC2 in 1987, although a film version had been made, with Sting in the leading role, in 1982.

Potter's groundbreaking play, Blue Remembered Hills, was first shown on the BBC on 30 January, 1979. There may have been a second showing soon afterwards, but it finally returned to the British small screen at Christmas 2004, and again in the summer of 2005, showcased as part of the winning decade (1970s) having been voted by BBC4 viewers as the golden era of British television. The BBC video has long been unavailable, but it finally received a DVD release in September 2005. The adult actors playing the roles of children were Helen Mirren, Janine Duvitski, Michael Elphick, Colin Jeavons, Colin Welland, John Bird, and Robin Ellis. It was directed by the late Brian Gibson. The moralistic theme was the child is father of the man.

Potter had used the dramatic device of adult actors playing children before, however the powerful imagery of "Blue Remembered Hills" lives on with the generation that first saw it, not least because of its uneasy, claustrophobic feeling provoking elements of xenophobia and a consideration of fearing the outsider, such was the prevalence of the post-war mood within British society.

Potter continued to make news as well as winning critical acclaim for drama serials such as Pennies From Heaven (1978) – which brought Bob Hoskins into the limelight – and The Singing Detective (1986), which did the same for Michael Gambon. Both series were adapted as feature films with 'Pennies' gaining Potter an Oscar nomination. He wrote the script for the widely praised but seldom seen 1985 miniseries of Tender Is the Night by Scott Fitzgerald, with Mary Steenburgen as Nicole Diver. His TV serial, Blackeyes (1989, also a novel), a drama about a fashion model was reviewed as self-indulgent by some critics. In 1992 he directed a film, Secret Friends (from his novel, Ticket to Ride), starring Alan Bates and executive-produced by Robert Michael Geisler and John Roberdeau (producers of Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line). Secret Friends premiered in New York at the Museum of Modern Art as the gala closing of the Museum of Radio & Television’s week-long retrospective of Potter’s work for TV. Potter also proposed to write an 'intermedia' stage play for Geisler-Roberdeau based on William Hazlitt’s Liber Amoris, or The New Pygmalion (he died before it could be commenced). Potter's romantic comedy Lipstick on Your Collar (1993) was a return to more conventional themes.

Although Potter won few awards, he is held in high regard by many within the television and film industry, and he was an obvious influence on such creators as Steven Bochco, Alan Ball, Margaret Edson and Alain Resnais. His work has been the subject of many critical essays, books, websites and documentaries.

Psoriasis

During the early 1960s, Potter began to suffer from an acute form of psoriasis known as psoriatic arthropathy, a rare hereditary condition that affected his skin and caused arthritis in his joints. There is some indication that this disease is the one the Bible refers to as "leprosy" (which is not Hansen's disease). For the rest of his life, Potter was frequently in hospital, sometimes completely unable to move and in great pain. The disease eventually ruined his hands, reducing them to what he called "clubs". He had to learn to write by strapping a pen to his hand.

In February 1994, Potter learned that he had terminal cancer of the pancreas and liver. It was thought that this was a side effect of the medication he was taking to control his psoriasis, also considerably aggravated by his chain-smoking habit. With typical sardonic humour, he named his cancer Rupert, after Rupert Murdoch, who represented so much of what he hated about British society.

He continued to care for his wife, Margaret Morgan Potter, who was suffering from the breast cancer that would soon claim her life, and then he died (aged 59) a week after she did.

Last interview

Shortly before his death, Potter gave a memorable, if uncomfortable to witness, interview to Channel 4 (he had broken most of his ties with the BBC as a result of his disenchantment with Directors-General Michael Checkland and especially John Birt, whom he had famously referred to as a "croak-voiced Dalek" ), in which he described his work and his determination to continue writing until the end. As he sipped on a morphine cocktail, he told a visibly moved Melvyn Bragg: "My only regret is if I die four pages too soon."

Final works

His final two serials were Karaoke and Cold Lazarus (two related stories, both starring Albert Finney as the same principal character, one set in the present and the other in the future). They were aired posthumously in the United Kingdom as part of a rare collaboration between the BBC and rival Channel 4 in accordance with Potter's wishes.

Criticism

Dennis Potter has been criticised by other television writers, notably by Alan Bennett and Matthew Graham for being too uncritical of himself, Graham saying "Dennis Potter came undone after The Singing Detective when he started to think that every line that dripped from his pen was a work of genius". Bennett refers in his 1998 diaries to a television programme which "takes Potter at his own self-evaluation (always high), when there was a good deal of indifferent stuff which was skated over". He was known as 'Dennis Plodder' by Private Eye due to the slow pace of some of his work; the Eye also called him "the whinging playwright".

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