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Dennis Christopher George Potter (17 May 1935 – 7 June 1994) was an English television playwright, screenwriter and journalist. He is best known for his BBC TV serials Pennies from Heaven (1978) and The Singing Detective (1986) as well as the BBC television plays Blue Remembered Hills (1979) and Brimstone and Treacle (1976).Graham Fuller "The Singing Detective: 25 Years On"", Sight and Sound, November 2011 (Updated 6 March 2014) His television dramas, often set or partly set in the Forest of Dean of his childhood, mixed fantasy and reality, the personal and the social, and often used themes and images from popular culture. Potter is widely regarded as one of the most influential and innovative dramatists to have worked in British television.
Born in Gloucestershire and graduating from Oxford University, Potter initially worked in journalism. After standing for UK parliament as a Labour candidate at the 1964 general election, his health was affected by the onset of psoriatic arthropathy which necessitated Potter to change career and led to his becoming a television dramatist. He began with contributions to BBC One's regular series The Wednesday Play from 1965, and he continued to work in the medium for the rest of his life, including writing screenplay adaptations for Hollywood studios. Potter died of pancreatic cancer in 1994.
In 1946, Potter passed the eleven-plus and attended Bell's Grammar School at Coleford. Most of his secondary education, however, was in London at St. Clement Danes Grammar School in Hammersmith (since demolished). When he was ten years old, Potter was sexually abused, an experience he would later allude to many times in his writing. During his speech at the 1993 James MacTaggart Memorial Lecture, Potter referred to this event when explaining his decision to switch from newspaper journalism to screenwriting: "Different words had to be found, with different functions. But why? Why, why, why; the same desperately repeated question I asked myself without any sort of an answer, or any ability to tell my mother or my father, when at the age of ten, between V.E. Day and V.J. Day, I was trapped by an adult's sexual appetite and abused out of innocence." His family returned to the Forest of Dean in 1952, having first left it in 1945, but Potter remained in London.
Between 1953 and 1955, his national service was in the Intelligence Corps of the British Army and he learned Russian at the Joint Services School for Linguists. "Dennis Potter obituary", The Daily Telegraph, 8 June 1994 Having won a State Scholarship to New College, Oxford,BBCTV Arena, Dennis Potter he studied philosophy, politics and economics.
Potter's first non-fiction work, The Glittering Coffin, was published by the Victor Gollancz in 1960. The book was a rumination on the changing face of England in the prosperity following the end of the war years. It was followed by The Changing Forest: Life in the Forest of Dean Today (1962), which was based on the "Between Two Rivers" documentary. This book is a study of class and social mobility that demonstrates an early fascination with the effects of the mass media on British cultural life.
He soon returned to television. Daily Herald journalist David Nathan persuaded Potter to collaborate with him on sketches for That Was the Week That Was. Their first piece was used in the edition of 5 January 1963.Humphrey Carpenter That Was Satire That Was: The Satire Boom in the 1960s, London, 2000, p. 232
Potter stood as the Labour Party candidate for Hertfordshire East, a safe Conservative Party seat, in the 1964 general election against the incumbent Derek Walker-Smith. By the end of the unsuccessful campaign, he claimed that he was so disillusioned with party politics he did not even vote for himself. Potter now embarked on work as a television playwright. He had begun to suffer in 1962 from a condition known as psoriatic arthropathy causing arthritis to develop in his joints as well as affecting his skin with psoriasis. It also made futile any attempt to follow a conventional career path.
Potter's most highly regarded works from this period were the semi-autobiographical plays Stand Up, Nigel Barton! and Vote, Vote, Vote for Nigel Barton, which featured Keith Barron. The former recounts the experience of a miner's son attending Oxford University where he finds himself torn between two worlds, culminating in Barton's participation in a television documentary. This mirrored Potter's participation in Does Class Matter (1958), a television documentary made while Potter was an Oxford undergraduate.Sergio Angelini "Stand Up, Nigel Barton (1965)", BFI screenonline The second play features the same character standing as a Labour candidate—his disillusionment with the compromises of electoral politics is based on Potter's own experience.Sergio Angelini "Vote, Vote, Vote, for Nigel Barton (1965)", BFI xcreenonline Both plays received praise from critics but aroused considerable tension at the BBC for their potentially incendiary critique of party politics. In his James MacTaggart Memorial Lecture in 1993, Potter recalled how he was asked by "several respected men at the corporation why I wanted to shit on the Queen."Dennis Potter Occupying Powers, 1993
Having already adapted Brimstone and Treacle for the stage after the television production was banned by the BBC, Potter set about writing a film version. It was directed by Richard Loncraine, who also directed Potter's Blade on the Feather at LWT, with Denholm Elliott reprising his role of Mr. Bates from the original television production, while Sting and Joan Plowright replaced Michael Kitchen and Patricia Lawrence in the roles of Martin Taylor and Mrs Bates, respectively. Although a British film made by Potter's own production company (Pennies Productions), the casting of Sting piqued the interest of American investors. As a result, references to Mr Bates' membership of the National Front and a scene discussing racial segregation were omitted—as were many of the non-naturalistic flourishes present in the television production—although the film was much more graphic in its depiction of sexual abuse and rape. The film was not a success at the box office.
Potter's screenplay for Gorky Park (1983) led to his gaining an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America.
The Singing Detective (1986), featuring Michael Gambon, used the dramatist's own problems with the skin disease psoriasis, for Potter an often debilitating condition leading to hospital admission, as a means to merge the lead character's imagination with his perception of reality.
Following Christabel (1988), Potter's adaptation of the memoirs of Christabel Bielenberg, his next TV serial, Blackeyes (1989) was a major disappointment in his career. A drama about a fashion model, it was reviewed as self-indulgent by some critics, and accused of contributing to the misogyny Potter claimed he intended to expose. The critical backlash against Potter following Blackeyes led to Potter being labelled 'Dirty Den' (after Den Watts, the EastEnders character) by the British tabloid press, and resulted in a period of reclusion from television. The serial was adapted into a Blackeyes (see below),
In 1990, referring to a scene in The Singing Detective, Mary Whitehouse claimed on BBC Radio that Potter had been influenced by witnessing his mother engaging in adulterous sex. Potter's mother won substantial damages from the BBC and The Listener.John R. Cook Dennis Potter: A Life on Screen, Manchester University Press, 1998, p.350, n.82 Potter had at least at times actually been an admirer of Mrs Whitehouse: the journalist Stanley Reynolds found in 1973 that he "loves the idea of Mrs Whitehouse. He sees her as standing up for all the people with ducks on their walls who have been laughed at and treated like rubbish by the sophisticated metropolitan minority". The Guardian, 16 February 1973, quoted in W. Stephen Gilbert The Life and Work of Dennis Potter, Woodstock, NY: The Overlook Press, 1998, p.145 (originally published as Fight and Kick and Bite: Life and Work of Dennis Potter, London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1995) In 1979 in an interview for The South Bank Show, he rejected "the chorus of abuse" suffered by Whitehouse because she accepted the "central moral importance of – to use the grandest word – art".Ben Thompson (ed) Ban This Filth!: Letters From the Mary Whitehouse Archive, London: Faber, 2012, p.85. Melvyn Bragg's interview with Potter, along with an earlier South Bank Show item about a 1978 theatre production of (the then banned TV play) Brimstone and Treacle, is included in the DVD set of the dramatist's work for London Weekend Television.
Potter's reputation within the American film industry following the box office disappointments of Pennies from Heaven and Gorky Park ultimately led to difficulty receiving backing for his projects. Potter is known to have written adaptations of The Phantom of the Opera, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, The White Hotel and his earlier television play Double Dare (1976): all these reached the preproduction stage before work was suspended.Cook Dennis Potter: A Life on Screen, p. 368 More fortunate was Mesmer (1993), a biographical film of the 19th century pseudo-scientist Franz Anton Mesmer. Potter's film, Secret Friends (1991), from his novel, Ticket to Ride, starring Alan Bates, premiered in New York at the Museum of Modern Art as the gala closing of the Museum of Television & Radio's week-long Potter retrospective.
The last film Potter actively worked on was Midnight Movie (1994), an adaptation of Rosalind Ashe's novel Moths. The film starred Louise Germaine and Brian Dennehy (who had appeared respectively in Lipstick on Your Collar and Gorky Park) and was directed by Renny Rye. Unable to secure financing from the Arts Council, Potter invested £500,000 in the production; BBC Films provided the rest of the capital. The film was not given a cinema release owing to a lack of interest from distributors and remained unseen until after Potter's death. It was finally broadcast on BBC2 in December 1994 in the Screen Two series, two months after a remake of his lost 1967 play Message for Posterity was transmitted.
A film version of The Singing Detective, based on Potter's own adapted screenplay, was released in 2003 by Icon Productions. Robert Downey, Jr. played the lead alongside Robin Wright and Mel Gibson. Gibson also acted as producer. Potter's screenplay of The White Hotel was adapted as a radio play and broadcast in September 2018.
On 15 March 1994, three months before his death while his health was deteriorating, Potter gave an interview to Melvyn Bragg, later broadcast on 5 April 1994 by Channel 4. He had broken most of his ties with the BBC as a result of his disenchantment with Directors-General Michael Checkland and John Birt. Using a morphine and champagne cocktail as pain relief, and chain smoking, he revealed that he had named his cancer "Rupert", after Rupert Murdoch, who Potter said represented so much of what he found despicable about the mass media in Britain. He described his work and his determination to continue writing until his death. Telling Bragg that he had two works he intended to finish, he proposed that these works, Karaoke and Cold Lazarus, should be made with the rival BBC and Channel 4 working in collaboration, a suggestion which was accepted.
The Bragg TV interview had revealed the "real" Dennis Potter as gentle and thoughtful and the immediate response was intense. The Guardian printed a full transcript the next day while Bragg reported: "Thousands of people reacted with phone calls and letters." Michael Grade, Channel 4’s chief executive, said: "I've never known a reaction to a programme like that, achieving such intimacy with an audience. Nothing stacks up against it in terms of impact."Carpenter, p. 563
Potter's final commission came from The Daily Telegraph Arts & Books section, prompted by the TV interview in March, to which he replied on 16 May, after honouring his television commitments: "I am pleased to tell you that I have completed Karaoke and Cold Lazarus – which I regard as essentially one eight-part piece. Now all that effort is of course evaporating into an overwhelming sense of loss, I itch to scribble something."Carpenter, p. 574 Immediately he was prompted to consider "the prospect of confronting imminent death" and on 25 May he submitted "my first and last short story" titled "Last Pearls", which was published on 4 June, days before he died.
The two related stories, Karaoke and Cold Lazarus, were eventually broadcast in 1996. One set in the present and the other in the far future, both feature Albert Finney as the same principal character. Both series were released on DVD on 6 September 2010.
Ticket to Ride (1986) was written between drafts of The Singing Detective and concerns a herbarium who is unable to make love to his wife unless he imagines her as a prostitute. This was followed in 1987 by Blackeyes: a study of a model whose abusive uncle, a writer, has stolen details of his niece's experiences in the glamour industry as the basis for his latest potboiler.
To tie in with the release of the MGM production of Pennies from Heaven in 1981, Potter wrote a novelisation of the screenplay. Potter turned down the option of writing a novelisation for the film version of Brimstone and Treacle, allowing his daughter Sarah Potter to write it instead.
Potter's pioneering method of using music in his work emerged when developing Pennies from Heaven (1978), one of his biggest successes. He asked actors to mime along to period songs. "Potter tried out the concept himself by lip-syncing to old songs while looking into a mirror. Potter himself once revealed that, working on harnessing songs in his plays, he was most productive 'at night, with old Al Bowlly records playing in the background'".The Independent, 7 January 2005, previewing Arena – Dennis Potter:It's in the Songs! It's in the Songs! BBC Four Potter had previously experimented with Bowlly's voice in Moonlight on the Highway (1969).
Potter's characters are frequently "doubled up"; either by Doppelgänger, using the same actor to play two roles (Kika Markham as the actress and the escort in Double Dare; Norman Rossington as Lorenzo the gaoler and the English traveller in Casanova) or two actors whose characters' destinies and personalities appear linked (Bob Hoskins and Kenneth Colley as Arthur and the accordion man in Pennies from Heaven; Rufus (Christian Rodska) and Gina the bear in A Beast With Two Backs).
A motif in Potter's writing is the concept of betrayal and this takes many forms in his plays. Sometimes it is personal ( Stand Up, Nigel Barton), political ( Traitor; Cold Lazarus) and other times it is sexual ( A Beast With Two Backs; Brimstone and Treacle). In Potter on Potter, published as part of Faber and Faber's series on , Potter told editor Graham Fuller that all forms of betrayal presented in literature are essentially religious and based on "the old, old story"; this is evoked in a number of works, from the use of popular songs in Pennies from Heaven to Potter's Gnosticism retelling of Jesus' final days in Son of Man.
The device of a disruptive outsider entering a claustrophobic environment is another theme. In plays where this occurs, the outsider will commit some apparently liberating act of evil (rape in Brimstone and Treacle) or violence (murder in Shaggy Dog) that gives physical expression to the un-sublimated desires of the characters in that setting.Michael Billington and Dennis Potter "Dennis Potter: there is a nostalgic, right wing impulse in England", The Guardian, 2015 (reprint of 1979 radio interview) While these more malevolent visitors are often supernatural beings ( Angels Are So Few), intelligence agents ( Blade on the Feather) or even figments of their host's imagination ( Schmoedipus), there are also—rare—instances of benign visitors whose presence resolves personal conflicts rather than exploits them ( Joe's Ark; Where Adam Stood).
On 14 February 1994, Potter experienced more than his usual daily pain. He was told he was suffering from incurable pancreas and liver cancer.
Months before Potter was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, his wife, Margaret, was diagnosed with breast cancer. Despite his own deteriorating condition and punishing work schedule, Potter continued to care for his wife until she died on 29 May 1994.
Nine days later, on 7 June 1994, Potter died of pancreatic cancer in Ross-on-Wye, Herefordshire, England, at age 59.
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