Bennett, Alan (21 January 1999). "What I did in 1998". London Review of Books. 21 (2) . Retrieved 10 October 2020. 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. Graham Fuller "The Singing Detective: 25 Years On"", Sight and Sound, November 2011 (Updated 6 March 2014) 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. Brown, Mark (3 August 2018). "Dennis Potter's adaptation of The White Hotel to premiere on Radio 4". The Guardian . Retrieved 3 August 2018.

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. Potter's screenplay of The White Hotel, adapted as a radio play, was broadcast in September 2018. [27] The media and Rupert Murdoch [ edit ] 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. 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. 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. The Singing Detective (1986), featuring Michael Gambon, used the dramatist's own battle with the skin disease psoriasis, for him an often debilitating condition, as a means to merge the lead character's imagination with his perception of reality.

By Year

Interview with Gina Bellman, quoted in Dennis Potter - A Biography by Humphrey Carpenter, Faber and Faber 1998, p.504 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 ] Dennis Potter was born in Berry Hill, Forest of Dean, Gloucestershire. His father, Walter Edward Potter (1906–1975), [2] was a coal miner in this rural mining area between Gloucester and Wales; his mother was Margaret Constance (née Wale; 1910–2001). Potter had a sister named June. [3] [ failed verification] Arena: Painting the Clouds: A Portrait of Dennis Potter (2003)". The Encyclopedia of Fantastic Film & Television. Archived from the original on 6 April 2012 . Retrieved 28 August 2019. The Daily Telegraph obituary". The Daily Telegraph. 8 June 1994. Archived from the original on 20 February 2011.

This section does not cite any sources. Please help improve this section by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. ( July 2018) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message) a b Lawson, Mark (7 June 1994). "Obituary: Dennis Potter". The Independent . Retrieved 7 February 2023. 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). 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.

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Potter’s final commission came from The Daily Telegraph Arts & Books section, prompted by the TV interview in March, to which he replied on 16 May, after honouring his television commitments: “I am pleased to tell you that I have completed Karaoke and Cold Lazarus – which I regard as essentially one eight-part piece. Now all that effort is of course evaporating into an overwhelming sense of loss, I itch to scribble something.” [34] Immediately he was prompted to consider "the prospect of confronting imminent death" and on 25 May he submitted “my first and last short story” titled "Last Pearls", [35] which was published on 4 June, days before he died. Griffin's Eye, Daily Mirror, 30 November 1989 (reproduced in Dennis Potter - A Biography by Humphrey Carpenter, Faber and Faber 1998, image no. 36)

Although Potter won few awards, he was and remains held in high regard by many within the television and film industry and was an influence on such creators as Mark Frost, Steven Bochco, Andrew Davies, Alain Resnais and Peter Bowker. [40] [41] [42] [43] [44] Alan Bennett was critical, referring 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", and believed that Potter's health was a factor in his fame, saying "he visibly conformed to what the public thinks artists ought to be—poor or promiscuous, suffering or starved". [45] [46] BBC Four marked the tenth anniversary of Potter's death in December 2004 with documentaries about his life and work, accompanied by showings of Pennies from Heaven and The Singing Detective, as well as several of his single plays—many of which had not been shown since their initial broadcast. [47] Potter's papers, including unproduced plays and unpublished fiction, are being catalogued and preserved at the Dean Heritage Centre in Gloucestershire. [48] Personal life [ edit ]

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. 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 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.