Denis Potter and I have things in common. Blue Remembered Hills was the title of his 1979 wartime drama starring Colin Welland and Helen Mirren, those coloured, recalled hills being Welsh but seen from the perspective of the English borderlands. Potter and I were of those ‘Marches’ lands – Worcestershire in my case, Gloucestershire in Potter’s, but either way looking wistfully west towards the Principality and those evocative mountains. We both had/have the writing bug too. There the similarities end for he rather put my own modest writing accomplishments in the shade. Potter would go on to be a leading TV dramatist, screenwriter, director, author, essayist and journo, and arguably one of the most important creative forces in British television.
Dennis Christopher George Potter was born in Berry Hill, a small village in the Forest of Dean on May 17, 1935, a son to local coal miner Walter Potter (1906-75) and Londoner Margaret née Wale (1910-2001). His grandfather had also been a miner. It was a place where religion still mattered, and Potter would be a Sunday chapel-goer in his formative years. He’d attend Berry Hill’s Christ Church School and Bell’s Grammar School in Coleford but would also be schooled in London, before completing National Service (1953-55) with the Army’s Intelligence Corps during which time he learned Russian, and then after a brief stint at the Meredith and Drew biscuit factory in Cinderford, attending New College, Oxford (1955-59) from which he graduated with a 2nd-class degree having studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics.
Potter married Margaret Morgan (1933-94) on January 10, 1959, at Christ Church, Berry Hill, the couple going on to have three children, two daughters, Sarah and Jane, and a son, Robert. Sarah would play cricket for England as well as being a writer. Potter’s writing career began around 1960 and would continue for some 35 years. His first published work, which he’d completed whilst at Oxford, The Glittering Coffin (1960), was non-fiction, examining England in fairly downbeat fashion in the years after the war, which was followed with works about his native Forest of Dean, including, whilst a BBC trainee, the documentary Between Two Rivers (1960), (they would be the Severn and Wye), and The Changing Forest: Life in the Forest of Dean Today (1962) which looked at his homeland but through the prism of mass media and the effects it had on the local culture. It was perhaps an early recognition and concern that individualism and distinctiveness could lose out as everywhere and everyone became pretty much the same. In between times, in 1961, he’d joined the Daily Herald, becoming its TV critic between 1962-64. Potter also wrote sketches for the popular TV series That Was the Week That Was, beginning in 1963. That love of the Forest of Dean never left him. He recognised it as a unique place and tapped into it in his writing: ‘A strange and beautiful place, with a people as warm as anywhere else, but they seemed warmer to me’.
Initially working as a journo, Potter tried standing, unsuccessfully, as a Labour candidate at the 1964 general election, albeit in a safe Tory seat, an election which resulted in a narrow Labour win for Harold Wilson and apparently disillusionment in party politics for Potter, who allegedly didn’t even bother voting for himself. Thus ended Potter’s political career before it had even started. The onset of a form of psoriasis from 1962, when he was aged 26, which affected both his skin and joints, led to Potter changing tack and making his way as a TV dramatist; more sit down and reclusive than roving reporter and current affairs. It was a medium that would serve him well, keeping him profitably occupied until the end of his days, including screenplay adaptations for Hollywood movies. His first contributions though were to the BBC’s The Wednesday Play from 1965 when he was in his early-30s with his first TV play, The Confidence Course, coming in that year. This was apparently about ‘motivational seminar swindlers’ which reminds me of the course I attended once when the lecturer dealt with the subject of procrastination by declaring: ‘Ah, we’ll deal with that later’. We never did and I felt swindled. It could have come straight from the Potter play-list. Potter really came to prominence in ’65, The Wednesday Play enabling his first four plays to be screened within a year. Dennis and Margaret moved back to the Forest of Dean briefly in 1966 before they chose Ross-on-Wye as their ‘Dunroamin’.
The religious part of Potter’s upbringing was reflected in his writing, too, with a series of provocative and unorthodox plays that challenged and offended the political, moral and theological establishment of the time. Son of Man (1969) saw Potter conjuring up the Messiah in his own image (see what I mean about provocative?), an audacious, controversial offering that was followed by Angels Are So Few (1970), Where Adam Stood (1976) and most sacrilegious of all, Brimstone and Treacle (1976 had it been broadcast when originally intended, but actually banned by the BBC for 11 years).
Perhaps Potter was most famous for the BBC TV drama series Pennies from Heaven (1978), which was his first international success, with Bob Hoskins famously miming along to the likes of Al Bowlly, The Singing Detective (1986), which some regard as the best original work ever created for TV with Michael Gambon doing a Potter, hospitalised with psoriasis, Blackeyes (1989), and Lipstick on Your Collar (1993), which recalled Potter’s National Service time and gave a first starring role to Ewan MacGregor, plus the BBC TV plays Brimstone and Treacle (1976) and Blue Remembered Hills (1979). His television dramas were a conflation of fantasy and reality, sometimes an unsettling mix of the two, as he became one of our most controversial playwrights. He drew on his personal experiences too, for example, Pennies from Heaven was partly set in his native Forest of Dean, whilst there was also a semi-autobiographical flavour to things as he explored consciousness and memory in an innovative, quirky fashion, one of his trademarks being the actors lip-synching to classic numbers. Other strategies were the use of flashback and Shakespearean asides as the actors talked directly to camera. Both Pennies from Heaven and The Singing Detective became American movies (1981 and 2003 respectively) although it’s fair to say that Potter’s original TV dramas had greater impact.
I like Potter because of his trenchant falling out with BBC bosses who he apparently labelled ‘croak-voiced Daleks’, commenting that it was impossible to make them ‘appear benevolent even if you dress one of them in an Armani suit’. Having said that he saw nothing wrong with television itself which had been kind to his career and enabled him to produce his best work: ‘I hope it’s clear by now that I happen to care very much about the medium that has both allowed and shaped the bulk of my life’s work and even my life’s meaning’. Potter certainly played his part in trying to get the message across that the humble TV could be just as worthy as theatre and cinema as far as artistic expression was concerned. It was towards the end of his career that Potter moved into directing, e.g. with Blackeyes (1989) and Secret Friends (1991).
When he was diagnosed with cancer, Potter put a shift in to try and complete his last two plays before he expired, remarking that: ‘My only worry is that I die four pages too soon’. He also named his condition ‘Rupert’ after someone he particularly detested. Margaret Potter died on May 29, 1994, aged 60, having suffered from breast cancer, with Dennis her carer over her final weeks and months. They had been married 35 years. Just nine days later, Dennis Potter died of pancreatic cancer in Ross-on-Wye, Herefordshire, on June 7, 1994, aged 59, still looking wistfully west towards those mountains. Potter’s papers are being preserved at the Dean Heritage Centre in Gloucestershire, whilst the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) has an award named after him for outstanding TV writing. Oh, and he finished those two plays, Karaoke and Cold Lazarus, with both transmitted posthumously in the spring of 1996. His life’s work included 28 plays, 11 serials, and screenplays for eight movies.
CHRONOLOGY
1935 – Dennis Christopher George Potter born in Berry Hill, Glos (May 17).
1955 – Potter completes his National Service during which he learns Russian.
1959 – Marriage to Margaret Morgan which bestowed three children on Potter.
1960 – First published work, the non-fiction ‘The Glittering Coffin’.
1962 – Onset of psoriasis, prompting a career change and influencing Potter’s future writing.
1964 – Unsuccessfully stands as a Labour candidate in the General Election.
1965 – Regular contributions to ‘The Wednesday Play’ on the BBC.
1966 – Potter and Margaret briefly return to the Forest of Dean before moving to Ross.
1978 – Potter achieves international recognition with TV series ‘Pennies from Heaven’.
1994 – Dennis Potter dies in Ross-on-Wye (June 7) aged 59.
