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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.

Between 1953 and 1955, his national service was in the Intelligence Corps of the British Army [4] and he learned Russian at the Joint Services School for Linguists. [5] Having won a State Scholarship to New College, Oxford, [6] [7] he studied philosophy, politics and economics. [8] Early career [ edit ]There is no writer alive, either in print and certainly not in the media, who ever managed to write works that wove together such mesmerising layers of meta-fiction and autobiography as Dennis Potter did. There are few efforts in Potter’s oeuvre that operate on the level of linear narrative – most are complex works that weave the author in as an integral part of the text. The Daily Telegraph obituary". The Daily Telegraph. 8 June 1994. Archived from the original on 20 February 2011. Potter was also the director, so the camera is his eye, a part of the space it helped create, moving god-like through it and inside of it. Michael Billington and Dennis Potter "Dennis Potter: there is a nostalgic, right wing impulse in England", The Guardian, 2015 (reprint of 1979 radio interview) Dennis Christopher George Potter (17 May 1935– 7 June 1994) was an English television dramatist, screenwriter and journalist. He is best known for his BBC television 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). [1] His television dramas 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.

If you think this female-male contest for ownership of narrative sounds to have come from some sort of literary theory, then I think you are right. But this is not an academic, dry read. It has many pop flourishes such as the already mentioned suspected murder, as well as sex, romance and maybe some dark secrets, too. In fact, at one point, the 'real' author complains of 'embarrassment' at the popular romance turn the tale takes. Dennis Potter is arguably the most important creative figure in the history of British television. From 1965 until his death in 1994, he constructed a personal work of such depth and consistency that it will probably never be equalled in the medium. The result was a critical bloodbath in the United Kingdom, with the director accused of precisely the misogyny and sexploitation he claimed he had been trying to expose on screen. Potter married Margaret Amy Morgan (14 August 1933 – 29 May 1994) on 10 January 1959, at the Christ Church parish church in Berry Hill. They lived at Ross-on-Wye, Herefordshire, and had three children, Robert, Jane, and Sarah. [5] Illness and death [ edit ] The most prolific yet also most controversial of television playwrights, he remains the undisputed figurehead of that peculiarly British phenomenon of writers who make it their passion to show that television can be just as powerful a vehicle for artistic expression as cinema or theatre.

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Although Potter only produced one play exclusively for theatrical performance ( Sufficient Carbohydrate, 1983 – later filmed for television as Visitors in 1987), he adapted several of his television scripts for the stage. Vote, Vote, Vote for Nigel Barton, which featured material from its sister-play Stand Up, Nigel Barton, was premiered in 1966, while Only Make Believe (1973), which incorporated scenes from Angels Are So Few (1970), made the transition to the stage in 1974. Son of Man appeared in 1969 with Frank Finlay in the title role (Finlay would also play Casanova in Potter's 1971 serial) and was restaged by Northern Stage in 2006. [37] Brimstone and Treacle was adapted for the stage in 1977 after the BBC refused to screen the original television version. The play text for Blue Remembered Hills was first published in the collection Waiting for the Boat (with Joe's Ark and Blade on the Feather) in 1984 and has since enjoyed several successful stage performances. Potter proposed to write an "intermedia" stage play for producers Geisler-Roberdeau based on William Hazlitt's Liber Amoris, or The New Pygmalion, but he died before it could be commenced. The story's typical of the author's work, which is to say it's a complex arrangement of layers presented in an unconventional, creative manner; a non-linear narrative that ebbs and flows; a sensual tide that takes as much as it gives. Graham Fuller "The Singing Detective: 25 Years On"", Sight and Sound, November 2011 (Updated 6 March 2014)

Potter's career as a television playwright began with The Confidence Course ( The Wednesday Play, 1965) which Potter had begun as a novel. [10] An exposé of the Dale Carnegie Institute, it drew threats of litigation from that organisation. [11] [12] Although Potter effectively disowned the play, excluding it from his Who's Who entry, [13] it used non-naturalistic dramatic devices (in this case breaking the fourth wall) which would become hallmarks of Potter's subsequent work. The Confidence Course script was liked by Wednesday Play script editor Roger Smith who then commissioned Potter to write what became the second Nigel Barton play for the new anthology series. [14] Alice (also 1965), his next transmitted play, chronicled the relationship between Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, better known by his nom de plume, Lewis Carroll, and his muse Alice Liddell. The play drew complaints from the descendants of Dodgson, and of Macmillan, the publisher, who objected to the way the relationship was depicted. [15] George Baker played Dodgson. In some regards, it's Potter-does-Potter, really - there's The Enduring Mystery Of Women, rooting and bits of improbable nudity. There's no doubt that though the main male character of the novel shares a name with an Amis, the doddering, farting author is something of a stand-in for the ageing Potter himself: all befuddlement and teddy bear attachment.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). It was in a street near Hammersmith Broadway that the ten-year-old Potter was sexually abused by his uncle, 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. The Independent, 7 January 2005, previewing Arena – Dennis Potter:It's in the Songs! It's in the Songs! BBC Four Potter's career in the early 1980s was spent as a screenwriter for the cinema. He returned to the BBC for a co-production with 20th Century Fox, writing the scripts for a widely praised but seldom-seen miniseries of F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night (1985) with Mary Steenburgen as Nicole Diver. Lccn 88040204 Ocr ABBYY FineReader 8.0 Ocr_converted abbyy-to-hocr 1.1.20 Ocr_module_version 0.0.16 Openlibrary_edition

There are some dated bits of satire on 'youth speak' that seems to come from a decade or two before the story, and the emotionless sex with multiple partners seems very pre-Aids though the novel was published in 1987. urn:oclc:754509487 Scandate 20100227004343 Scanner scribe12.sfdowntown.archive.org Scanningcenter sfdowntown Worldcat (source edition) 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. [9] Potter, Dennis (September 2015). "Note 336". The Art of Invective: Selected Non-Fiction 1953–94. Oberon Books. ISBN 978-1-78319-203-8. Dennis Christopher George Potter (17 May 1935 – 7 June 1994) was an English dramatist, best known for The Singing Detective (1986). His widely acclaimed television dramas mixed fantasy and reality, the personal and the social. He was particularly fond of using themes and images from popular culture. Such was his reputation that he convinced BBC 2 and Channel 4 to co-operate in screening his final two works, written in the months he was aware of his impending death.

In 1990, The Observer newspaper asked several British television screenwriters to nominate the most influential person in the field. Potter was voted the most influential. Davies, who chose Potter, stated that "there can be no writer working in television today, or in any medium, who can claim even half the influence of Dennis Potter." 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. [16] 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. [17] Both plays received praise from critics but aroused considerable tension at the BBC for their potentially incendiary critique of party politics. [17] 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." [18] First film screenplays [ edit ] Bennett, Alan (21 January 1999). "What I did in 1998". London Review of Books. 21 (2) . Retrieved 10 October 2020. In 1961, while covering a meeting of the Young Conservatives, Potter was suddenly unable to rise from the press table and his knee felt hot. He was taken to a hospital, where his other joints blew up, also, and his skin scalded off his body overnight. Potter was diagnosed with psoriatic arthropathy. [49]