Dennis Potter

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Dennis Potter
Cover of The Life and Work of Dennis Potter
Born	17 May 1935 Berry Hill, Forest of Dean, Gloucestershire, England
Died	7 June 1994 (aged 59) Ross-on-Wye, England
Occupation	television playwright, director novelist
Nationality	British
Writing period	1965 - 1994
Genres	Drama
Influences William Hazlitt, George Orwell, David Mercer

Dennis Christopher George Potter (17 May 1935–7 June 1994) was an English dramatist, best known for The Singing Detective. 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.

Contents 1 Biography 2 Works 2.1 Television 2.2 Film 2.3 Style and themes 3 Psoriasis 4 Politics 4.1 Media and Rupert Murdoch 4.2 Last interview 5 Widowerhood and death 6 Final works 7 Legacy 8 Criticism 9 Sources 10 External links

[edit] Biography

Dennis Potter was born in Berry Hill, Forest of Dean, Gloucestershire. His father, Walter Edward Potter (1906–1975), was a coal miner in this rural mining area between Gloucester and Wales; his mother was Margaret Constance, née Wale (b. 1910).

Brought up a Protestant he attended the local Salem chapel, and went to Christchurch junior school where, in 1945, he passed the eleven-plus entrance examination to Bell's Grammar School at Coleford. He then went to St. Clement Danes School in London, while the family lived for a time with his maternal grandfather in Hammersmith. During this time, the ten year old Potter was sexually abused by his uncle; it was an experience he would later allude to many times in his writing. ^[1] Between 1953 and 1955, he did his National Service and learnt Russian at the Joint Services School for Linguists, serving with the Intelligence Corps and subsequently at the War Office.

After national service, in 1956, he won a scholarship and went to New College, Oxford to study Politics, Philosophy and Economics, editing Isis magazine. He graduated in 1958, after obtaining a second-class degree. A tall, lean young man with red hair, he was described by his economics tutor as a ‘cross between Jimmy Porter and Keir Hardie’.^[2] On 10 January 1959 he married Margaret Amy Morgan (1933–1994) at Christchurch parish church. The Potters had a son, Robert and two daughters, Jane and Sarah, who was to achieve fame in the 1980s as an international cricketer.

After Oxford, Potter joined the BBC, initially as a trainee in radio and then television journalism, during which time he worked on Panorama about the closure of coalpits in the Forest of Dean. He did not take to television journalism and left, joining the left-wing newspaper Daily Herald from August 1961 he became a television critic for that paper and for its successor, The Sun. However, he soon returned to television, writing sketches for That Was The Week That Was. He was also considered becoming a Labour Member of Parliament. Potter unsuccessfully stood for Hertfordshire East, a safe Conservative Party seat, in the 1964 general election against the incumbent Derek Colclough Walker-Smith. By the end of the campaign, he claimed that he was so disillusioned with party politics he did not even vote for himself. Potter then embarked on his career as a television playwright, largely after watching the 1963 Granada version of Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace, based on Erwin Piscator's celebrated stage production. Potter had called it ‘surely the most exciting evening that TV has ever given us’.^[3]

[edit] Works

[edit] Television

Potter's career as a television playwright began with The Confidence Course, an exposé of the Dale Carnegie Institute that drew threats of litigation. Although Potter effectively disowned the play, it is notable for its use of non-naturalistic dramatic devices (in this case breaking the fourth wall) which would become hallmarks of Potter's subsequent work. Broadcast as part of the BBC's The Wednesday Play strand in 1965, The Confidence Course proved successful and Potter was invited for further contributions. His next play, Alice (1965), was a controversial drama chronicling the relationship between Lewis Carroll and his muse Alice Liddel. Potter's most celebrated works from this period are the semi-autobiographical plays Stand Up, Nigel Barton! and Vote, Vote, Vote for Nigel Barton; the former the tale of a miner's son going to university in Oxford where he finds himself torn between two worlds, the latter featuring the same character standing as a Labour candidate - his disillusionment with the compromises of electoral politics is based on Potter's own experiences. Both plays received praise from critics' circles but aroused considerable tension at the BBC for their potentially incendiary critique of party politics.^[4]

Potter took another 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 him being accused of blasphemy. The same year, Potter contributed Moonlight on the Highway to ITV's Saturday Night Theatre strand. The play centered around a young man who attempts to blot out memories of the sexual abuse he suffered as child in his obsession with the music of Al Bowlly. As well as being an intensely personal play for Potter, it is notable for being his first foray in the use of popular music to heighten the dramatic tension in his work.

His 1971 serial Casanova was criticized 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 1982 film version had been made, with Sting in the leading role.

Potter's groundbreaking 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. In 1980 he received a lucrative deal with LWT to write a series of six single plays for ITV, with a further three written by Jim Allen. Problems with funding led to only three of these plays being produced: the BAFTA-winning Blade on the Feather, Rain on the Roof and Cream in My Coffee, which won Grand Prize at the Prix Italia.

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. He also wrote the script for the widely praised but seldom seen 1985 miniseries of F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night with Mary Steenburgen as Nicole Diver.

Potter's TV miniseries, Blackeyes (1989, also a novel), a drama about a fashion model was reviewed as self-indulgent by some critics, and accused of contributing to the misogyny Potter claimed he intended to expose.^[5] The critical backlash against Potter following Blackeyes led to him being nicknamed 'Dirty Den' by the Briish tabloid press, and resulted in a long period of reclusion from television. In 1990 Mary Whitehouse, a long time critic of Potter, claimed on BBC Radio that Potter had been influenced by witnessing his mother engaged in adulterous sex. Potter's mother won substantial damages from the BBC and The Listener, who were reportedly unimpressed by Whitehouse's claim to have had a blackout on air and subsequently to have had no recollection of her words.^[6]In 1992 he directed a film, Secret Friends (from his novel, Ticket to Ride), starring Alan Bates. The executive producers were Robert Michael Geisler and John Roberdeau, who later produced 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 Television & Radio’s week-long Potter retrospective. Potter proposed to write an "intermedia" stage play for Geisler-Roberdeau based on William Hazlitt’s Liber Amoris, or The New Pygmalion, but he died before it could be commenced. Potter's romantic comedy Lipstick on Your Collar (1993) was a return to more conventional themes and the familiar format of six hour-long episodes, but did not become the desired popular success, although it helped launch the career of Ewan McGregor.^[5]

[edit] Film

In 1978, Herbert Ross was shooting Nijinsky at Shepperton Studios and invited Potter to write the screenplay for his next project Unexpected Valleys. After watching Pennies from Heaven on television one evening, Ross contacted Potter about the prospect of adapting it for the cinema.^[7] The project was launched at MGM as an 'anti-musical' with Steve Martin and Bernadette Peters in the lead roles. According to Potter, the studio demanded continual rewrites of the script and made significant cuts to the film after initial test screenings. The film was released in 1981 to mixed critical reaction and was a box office disaster. Potter was, however, nominated for the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar that year alongside Harold Pinter for The French Lieutenant's Woman.

Potter's screenplay for Gorky Park (1983) earned him an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America. He also wrote the screenplay for Dreamchild (1985), a cinematic adaptation of his earlier Alice script. In her last film role, Coral Browne portrayed the elderly Alice Hargreaves who recalls in flashbacks her childhood when she was the inspiration for Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. In 1987 he adapted his television play Schmoedipus (1975) for the cinema. The ensuing film, Track 29, directed by Nicolas Roeg, was the last project Potter would pursue in Hollywood.The film has never been repeated on American television, though it is known that one copy is extant in the New York Film Museum, with the lead role played by Tim Curry. His reputation within the American film industry following the box office disappointments of Pennies from Heaven and Gorky Park led to a 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 own 1976 television play Double Dare: all reaching the preproduction stage before work was suspended. More lucky was Mesmer (1993), Potter's take on the life of 19th century pseudo-scientist Franz Anton Mesmer, although the completed film has yet to receive a European release.

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 in Lipstick on Your Collar and Gorky Park, respectively) and was directed by Renny Rye. Unable to secure financing from the Arts Council, Potter invested half a million pounds into the production; BBC Films provided the rest of the capital. The film was given not given a cinema release due to a lack of interest from distributors and remained unseen until Potter's death. It was finally broadcast on BBC2 in November 1994 as part of their "Screen Two" season alongside a remake of his 1967 play Message for Posterity.

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-Penn and Mel Gibson. Gibson also acted as producer.

[edit] Style and themes

Potter's work is distinctive for its use of non-naturalistic devices. The 'lip-sync' technique he developed for his "serials with songs" (Pennies from Heaven; The Singing Detective and Lipstick on Your Collar), extensive use of flashback and nonlinear plot structure (Casanova; Late Call), direct to camera address (Vote, Vote, Vote for Nigel Barton) and works where "the child is father to the man", in which he used adult actors to play children, (Stand Up, Nigel Barton; Blue Remembered Hills) have all become Potter trademarks. They are frequently deployed in works where the line between fantasy and reality becomes blurred, often as a result of the influence of popular culture (Willie, the Wild West obsessive played by Hywel Bennett in Where the Buffalo Roam) or from a character's apparent awareness of their status as a pawn in the hands of an omniscient author (the actor Jack Black (Denholm Elliot) in Follow the Yellow Brick Road).

One major motiff 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 auteurs, 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 gnostic retelling of Jesus' final days in Son of Man.

The "Pinteresque" device of a disruptive outsider entering a claustrophobic environment is another recurring theme. In plays where this occurs, the outsider will commit some liberating act of sex (Rain on the Roof) or violence (Shaggy Dog) that gives physical expression to the unsublimated desires of the characters in that setting. 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 prescence resolves personal conflicts rather than exploits them (Joe's Ark).

Potter's characters are frequently "doubled up", either by using the same actor to play two different roles (Kika Markham as the actress and escort in Double Dare; Norman Rossington as Lorenzo the gaoler and the English traveller in Casanova) or two different actors whose characters' destinies and personalities appear interlinked (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).

[edit] Psoriasis

In 1962 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. For the rest of his life, Potter was frequently in hospitals, 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. Potter kept working between bouts of pain, nausea, and diarrhoea, clutching a pen in his clawed fist and writing in surprisingly neat longhand. ‘I can't use a typewriter’, he said, ‘because my trailing fingers would hit more than one key at once’^[8]. The script of Son of Man (1969), mostly written in hospital, was delivered with drops of blood and cortisone grease splashed on it.

[edit] Politics

[edit] Media and Rupert Murdoch

In 1993 Potter was given an half hour in prime time by Channel 4 in their Opinions strand produced by Open Media. Broadcast just before the third episode of Lipstick on Your Collar, itself a rumination on the effects of the mass media, in this case through popular music, Potter's chosen topic was what he perceived to be a contamination of news media and its effect on declining standards in British television. Craig Brown described the programme in The Sunday Times (owned by Rupert Murdoch):

"Potter announced at the beginning: I'm going to get down there in the gutter where so many journalists crawl... what I'm about to do is to make a provenly vindictive and extremely powerful enemy... the enemy in question is that drivel-merchant, global huckster and so-to-speak media psychopath, Rupert Murdoch... Hannibal the Cannibal....

As a performance, it had a lot going for it. I have never seen a talking head on television so immediate or so unabated in its anger. In many ways, it felt like being collared by a madman on the Tube. Filmed disturbingly close to camera, seemingly ad-libbing the entire half-hour, now mumbling, now rasping, Potter somehow managed to cut through the vacuum that on television usually separates viewer from viewee. This made the performance extraordinary."^[9]

[edit] Last interview

On 14 February 1994, Potter learned that he had terminal cancer of the pancreas and liver.^[5] It was thought that this was a side effect of the medication he was taking to control his psoriasis. With typical sardonic humour, he named his cancer "Rupert", after Rupert Murdoch, who represented so much of what he found despicable about British mass media.^[10] On 15 March 1994, three months before his death, Potter gave a strikingly memorable 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")^[11], 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 that he had two works he intended to finish (Cold Lazarus and Karaoke) before his impending death: "My only regret is if I die four pages too soon". The interview was shown on 5 April 1994.

[edit] Widowerhood and death

Some months before Potter was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer his wife, Margaret Morgan Potter, was informed that she had breast cancer. Despite his own deteriorating condition and punishing work schedule, Potter continued to care for her until she died on 29 May 1994. He died nine days later, in Ross-on-Wye, Herefordshire, England, aged 59.

[edit] 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 far 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.^[5]

Unfortunately, a side effect of his last wishes for the BBC and Channel 4 to collaborate on these works has been that the copyright and further usage rights to the works has remained unclear. For this reason neither Karaoke nor Cold Lazarus is available on DVD. However, both are presently being shown as part of the Channel 4 on demand options, available through the Channel 4 website and Virgin Media's 'TV Choice On Demand' interactive service.

[edit] Legacy

Although Potter won few awards, he is held in high regard by many within the television and film industry, and he was an influence on such creators as Steven Bochco, Alan Ball, Andrew Davies, Charlie Kaufman, Peter Bowker, Margaret Edson and Alain Resnais.^{[citation needed]} His work has been the subject of many critical essays, books, websites and documentaries.

[edit] Criticism

Potter was sometimes attacked by other television writers, most notably Alan Bennett and Matthew Graham, for a perceived lack of humility and self-criticism; Graham described him as having "come undone" after The Singing Detective and beginning to believe "every line that dripped from his pen was a work of genius".^{[citation needed]} Bennett referred in his 1998 diaries to a television programme "that took Potter at his own self-evaluation (always high), when there was a good deal of indifferent stuff which was skated over". Private Eye once lampooned him as Dennis Plodder, due to the slow pace of some of his work, and also branding him as "the whinging playwright".

[edit] Sources

Footnotes

[edit] External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Dennis Potter

• Dennis Potter official site
• The Singing Detective - Exploring Dennis Potter's Thematic Preoccupations British Film Resource
• 1986 and 1991 interviews with Dennis Potter BBC4 (Audio)
• Interview with Dennis Potter British Film Institute Screenonline (Video excerpts)
• Dennis Potter at the Internet Movie Database