The Sunday Scribbler: Dennis Potter

As a writer you will know, one of the favourite fantasy plots of a writer is a character’s told you’ve got three months to live – which is what I was told – and who would you kill? (I) call my cancer, the main one, the pancreas one, I call it Rupert, so I can get close to it. Because the man, Murdoch, is the one who, if I had the time – in fact I’ve got too much writing to do and I haven’t got the energy – but I would shoot the bugger if I could.

Dennis Potter in interview with Melvyn Bragg

Television has always fought for legitimacy as a medium. As it grew into a mass cultural phenomenon, it was unpopular to talk about television in artistic terms. It was considered more of a bastard child to theatre rather than a serious rival. But some writers were to define television as a modern theatre of the masses, bringing a new form of drama to a wider audience, elevating the television script to the level of artform.

Unlike many of his contemporaries, Dennis Potter was not simply crossing over from theatre to the new medium, Harold Pinter among them. Potter started, continued and ended in television, bringing a legitimacy and innovation that transformed audience expectations of what the medium could and should achieve.

The prolific Potter produced an astonishing number of one-off television plays and mini series for television across a career spanning over thirty years. Considering the artistry and care put into each script, despite suffering from terrible psoriasis for most of his life, the output is staggering. Although illness slowed output in the final years of his life, Dennis Potter fought great pain and crippling cancers to complete his final two scripts. His devotion to the craft would not let him do anything else.

Post Modernism and Innovation

’The Singing Detective’, released in 1986, is the pinnacle of Potter’s career. Following a similar musical format to his previous ‘Pennies From Heaven’, ‘The Singing Detective’ wove disparate storylines of adult illness, childhood memories and pulp noir fantasy into a postmodern tale of a writer fighting to make some sense in the world. With self-aware characters and the nuts and bolts of scriptwriting clearly visible beneath the veneer, the series is a crafted piece of art more than a simple play. ‘The Singing Detective’ presents such a complexity of flavours that it is like experiencing a complete meal – with cheap and fizzy soft drink to start and fine wine to finish.

Most of Potter’s greatest plays drew considerably on his own life. From his childhood in the Forest of Dean (featured in ‘The Singing Detective’, Blue Remembered Hills, ‘Cold Lazarus’ and more) to the psoriatic arthropathy that turned his body against him (‘The Singing Detective’) Potter wrote from experience. This was a writer willing to expose himself, hold up the darkest, most distasteful facets of his psyche to the light, and then explore them in plays that dared the audience to recognise these same weaknesses in themselves.

Controversy and Self Confession

This tendency for self-confession reached a new level with ‘Blackeyes’, written, directed and narrated by Potter and broadcast in 1989. The dramatised lustings and unfaithful fantasies of men became too uncomfortable for some of the audience and Potter’s own performance as the narrator betrayed the relationship between the writer and the subject. Potter was imitating the art of his own play by admitting to his obsessive fixation for Blackeyes’ actress Gina Bellman. Potter had inadvertently turned what was originally intended as an apology to women for the sexual manipulations of men into a statement of his own obsessions.

But controversy and public confession couldn’t diminish his importance to television drama. An outspoken critic of many media developments throughout his life, particularly of media ownership and what he saw as the erosion of television’s potential as it pandered to lower and lower criteria, Potter was a champion of television’s cultural importance. His 1994 interview with Melvyn Bragg, just a few weeks prior to his death, gave Potter his last chance to rail against the gods. With his hands clenched with the crippling arthritis and swigging from a flask of morphine throughout, Potter gave his final statement to the world, before issuing a challenge for his epitaph. Potter announced his final two scripts – two six part serials – that he was frantically trying to finish before he died. These would serve as his last gift to the medium he loved, but there were conditions. ‘Karaoke’, dealing with a writer’s mortality as he experiences his final days, would be shown by the BBC, before being repeated on Channel Four – the competition. Channel four would then show “Cold Lazarus’, the sequel, an exploration of a legacy after death and the loss of one’s identity and experiences from the world. This would then be repeated on the BBC.

Final Words

For the two channels to cooperate in this way was unusual. To closely link the productions was a new experiment. It was in recognition of the importance of Dennis Potter to television drama that the two channels carried out his final wishes completely, producing and broadcasting his last twelve hours of television exactly as he laid out.

To fully understand Potter’s plays, you need to understand Potter. He permeates every character, every word, every location as he holds his own life up as the lense through which to view us all.

”Below my window in Ross,… the blossom is out in full now. It’s a plum tree, it looks like apple blossom but it’s white, and looking at it, instead of saying ‘Oh that’s nice blossom’…last week looking at it through the window when I’m writing, I see it is the whitest, frothiest, blossomest blossom that there ever could be, and I can see it… The nowness of everything is absolutely wonderous… The fact is, if you see the present tense, boy do you see it! And boy can you celebrate it.”

Dennis Potter in interview with Melvyn Bragg

Other Writers in this Series

• Paul Cornell
• Bill Bryson