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 equaled 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 theater.

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 that institution’s language and metaphors formed a powerful influence on his writing.

After an earlier career in journalism and politics, Potter came to prominence in 1965, when his first plays were all transmitted by the BBC within the space of a year, as part of The Wednesday Play’s ground-breaking policy of introducing radical new writers to television. The most successful of these productions were The Nigel Barton Plays—a pair of semiautobiographical dramas that expertly dissected the effects of social class upon the psyche of its eponymous hero. The Barton plays won notable awards and helped to seal Potter’s reputation as a major new playwright of passion and ideas. However, as the 1960s wore on and Potter continued to write for The Wednesday Play and its successor Play for Today, it gradually became clear that underlying the broadly political attacks in his earlier work was an older chapel sensibility: Potter represented a personality molded by biblical teaching and imagery, yet now in desperate search of answers in the face of acute spiritual crisis.

In 1969 Son of Man was transmitted; it is a gospel play in which Potter audaciously created the messiah in his own image, as 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 11 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 en flaming 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 “nonnaturalistic” style: his determination to challenge the dominant British television drama tradition of “dreary” naturalism, through an alternative emphasis on inner, psychological reality. He successfully customized a whole series of nonnaturalistic 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, although he now wrote serials rather than one-off plays. Among his most notable programs from this era is The Singing Detective (1986), in which his famous device of characters miming to popular song is used to punctuate a narrative as complex and layered as any work of serious literature; this program that will undoubtedly endure as Potter’s monument to the creative possibilities of the medium.

The rapturous plaudits that greeted The Singing Detective in Britain and the United States may have elevated Potter to the rare status of a 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 Black-eyes. The result was a critical bloodbath in the United Kingdom, with the director accused of precisely the misogyny and sexual exploitation 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 desired.

In February 1994 Potter was diagnosed with terminal cancer of the pancreas. He died four months later but not before giving 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 coproduced by rival national channels BBC 1 and Channel 4. 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. Although critical reaction to the programs was somewhat mixed in Britain, 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 nonnaturalism had indeed been successful in opening up the medium’s drama to the landscape of the mind.