DENNIS (CHRISTOPHER GEORGE) POTTER. Born in Joyford Hill, Coleford, Gloucestershire, England, 17 May 1935. Attended Christchurch Village School; Bell's Grammar School, Coleford; St. Clement Danes Grammar School, London; New College, Oxford, B.A., 1959. Married: Margaret Morgan, 1959; one son and two daughters. Began career as member of the Current Affairs Staff, BBC Television, 1959-61; television critic for various publications, 1961-78; contributed to That Was the Week That Was, 1962; Labour candidate for Parliament, East Hertfordshire, 1964; first plays televised, 1965; first screenplay, 1982. Honorary fellow, New College, Oxford, 1987. Recipient: Writers Guild Awards, 1965 and 1969; Society of Film and Television Arts Award, 1966; British Academy of Film and Television Arts Award, 1979 and 1980; Prix Italia, 1982; San Francisco Film Festival Award, 1987; Broadcasting Press Guild Award, 1987. Died, in Ross-on-Wye, Herefordshire, 7 June 1994.

TELEVISION SERIES

1971 Casanova
1978 Pennies from Heaven
1985 Tender is the Night
1986 The Singing Detective
1988 Christabel
1989 Blackeyes (writer, director)
1993 Lipstick on Your Collar

TELEVISION PLAYS

1965 The Wednesday Play: The Confidence Course
1965 Alice
1965 Cinderella
1965 Stand Up, Nigel Barton
1965 Vote Vote Vote for Nigel Barton
1966 Emergency Ward 9
1966 Where the Buffalo Roam
1967 Message for Posterity
1968 The Bonegrinder
1968 Shaggy Dog
1968 A Beast with Two Backs
1969 Moonlight on the Highway
1969 Son of Man
1970 Lay Down your Arms
1970 Angels Are So Few
1971 Paper Roses
1971 Traitor
1972 Follow the Yellow Brick Road
1973 Only Make Believe
1973 A Tragedy of Two Ambitions
1974 Joe's Ark
1974 Schmoedipus
1975 Late Call
1976 Double Dare
1976 Where Adam Stood
1978 The Mayor of Casterbridge
1979 Blue Remembered Hills
1980 Blade on the Feather
1980 Rain on the Roof
1980 Cream in My Coffee
1987 Visitors
1987 Brimstone and Treacle
1996 Karaoke
1996 Cold Lazarus

FILMS

Pennies from Heaven, 1981; Brimstone and Treacle, 1982; Gorky Park, 1983; Dreamchild, 1985; Track 29, 1988; Blackeyes, 1990; Secret Friends (writer, director), 1991.

STAGE

Sufficient Carbohydrate, 1983.

PUBLICATIONS

The Glittering Coffin. London: Gollancz, 1960.

The Changing Forest: Life in the Forest of Dean Today. London: Secker and Warburg, 1962.

The Nigel Barton Plays: Stand Up, Nigel Barton, Vote Vote Vote for Nigel Barton: Two Television Plays. Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1968.

Son of Man (television play). London: Samuel French, 1970.

Hide and Seek (novel). London: Deutsch, 1973.

Brimstone and Treacle (television play). New York, Samuel French, 1978.

Pennies from Heaven (novel). London: Quartet, 1981.

Sufficient Carbohydrate (play). London: Faber, 1983.

Waiting for the Boat: Dennis Potter on Television. London: Faber, 1984.

The Singing Detective (television series). London: Faber, 1986.

Ticket to Ride (novel). London: Faber, 1986.

Blackeyes (novel). London: Faber, 1987.

Christabel (television series), 1988.

Wyver, John. "Arrows of Desire (Interview)." New Statesman & Society (London), 24 November 1989,

Potter on Potter, ed. by Graham Fuller. London; Boston: Faber and Faber, 1993.

Seeing the Bloosom: Two Interviews, A Lecture and A Story. London; Boston: Faber and Faber, 1994.

Bragg, Melvin. "The Present Tense (Interview)." New Left Review (London), May-June 1994.

Rockwell, John. "Dennis Potter's Last Interview: On 'Nowness' and His Work." The New York Times, 12 June 1994.

Karaoke and Cold Lazarus (television plays). London: Faber, 1996.

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 oeuvre of such remarkable character and consistency that it will probably never be equalled in the medium. The most prolific yet also most controversial of television playwrights, he remains the undisputed figurehead of that peculiarly British phenomenon of writers who expend much of their working lives and passions attempting to show that television can be just as powerful a vehicle for artistic expression as cinema or theatre.

Born on 17 May 1935, Potter was raised in what he later described as the "tight, enclosed, backward" world of the Forest of Dean; a remote rural idyll nestling between two rivers, the Severn and the Wye, on the aggressively English side of the border with Wales. The product of a remote God-fearing community, he attended chapel at least twice every Sunday and the vividness of its language and metaphors formed a powerful influence on his writing.

He came to prominence in 1965, when, after an earlier career in journalism and politics, his first four plays were all transmitted by the BBC within the space of a year, as part of The Wednesday Play slot's ground-breaking policy of introducing radical new writers to television. Of these, the most successful were The Nigel Barton Plays--a pair of semi-autobiographical dramas which expertly dissected the effects of social class upon the psyche of its eponymous hero, winning awards and helping to seal Potter`s reputation as a major new playwright of passion and ideas. Only as the 1960s wore on and he continued to write for The Wednesday Play and its successor Play for Today, did it gradually become clear that underlying the broadly political attacks of his earlier work was an older chapel sensibility: the personality moulded by Biblical teaching and imagery, yet one now in desperate search of answers in the face of acute spiritual crisis.

In 1969, Son of Man was transmitted; a Gospel Play in which Potter audaciously created the Messiah in his own image: a human, suffering Christ, racked by doubts over his own mission and plagued by the fear that he has been forsaken by God. With this and other titles that followed such as Angels Are So Few (1970), Where Adam Stood (1976) and most controversially of all, Brimstone and Treacle--originally intended for transmission in 1976 but banned by the BBC for eleven years on account of a scene where the Devil rapes a mentally handicapped girl-- it became clear that Potter had discovered his true vocation as a dramatist of religious or spiritual themes, albeit one highly unorthodox and sometimes offensive to the political and moral establishment.

Central to Potter's quest for spiritual answers was his own personal affliction of psoriatic arthropathy: a painful combination of psoriasis enflaming the skin and arthritis crippling the joints which he had suffered from since the age of 26 and which had necessitated his withdrawal from the public worlds of politics and current affairs into the more private realm of life as a television playwright. This inwardness was also manifested in Potter's famous non-naturalistic style: his determination to challenge the dominant British television drama tradition of "dreary" naturalism, through an alternative emphasis on inner, psychological reality. He successfully customised a whole series of non-naturalistic devices--including flashback and fantasy sequences; direct-to-camera address by characters; the use of adult actors to play children--all of which he believed represented more truthfully "what goes on inside people's heads".

In 1978, Potter showcased what became his most famous technique when Bob Hoskins burst into song, miming to an old 78 RPM recording in the BBC TV serial, Pennies from Heaven. The international success of Pennies transformed Potter's career, leading to a lucrative spell as a Hollywood screenwriter which included a disastrous movie remake of the serial in 1981. Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, however, Potter continued to produce original work for television, though serials now rather than one-off plays: nowhere perhaps more decisively than with The Singing Detective (1986), in which his famous device of characters miming to popular song was used to punctuate a narrative as complex and layered as any work of serious literature; one that will undoubtedly endure as Potter's monument to the creative possibilities of the medium.

The rapturous plaudits which greeted The Singing Detective in Britain and the United States may have elevated him to the rare status of genuine TV auteur but the period after 1986 was not an easy one for Potter. In 1989, after a falling out with his erstwhile producer Kenith Trodd, Potter decided to direct a television adaptation of his "feminist" novel, Blackeyes. 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. Nor was Lipstick on Your Collar (1993)--a six part "drama with songs" set in the 1950s--the resounding popular success he had hoped for.

In February 1994, Potter was diagnosed with terminal cancer of the pancreas and died four months later but not before an extraordinary television interview in which he talked movingly about his imminent death, revealing his plans to complete two final television serials to be uniquely co-produced by rival national channels, BBC-1 and Channel Four. Defying the medical odds, he succeeded in completing the works, Karaoke and Cold Lazarus and in accordance with his wishes, these were transmitted posthumously by both channels in the spring of 1996. Though critical reaction in Britain was somewhat mixed, the very fact of the joint production seemed to confirm Potter's creative legacy as the practitioner who, above all others, aspired to raise television to an art form and whose pioneering non-naturalism had indeed been successful in opening up its drama to the landscape of the mind.

-John Cook