Dennis Potter

Auteur House has recently acquired a boxset of material written for British television by the great Dennis Potter.  Potter had an occasional, largely unsuccessful flirtation with the cinema but was the most original and innovative writer that the small screen has ever seen.  More than any other career Potter’s demonstrates that television is a writer’s medium.

Potter wrote both one-off television plays and longer, usually six part mini-series.  Though he sometimes adapted respected novels like Thomas Hardy’s “Mayor of Casterbridge” and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Tender is the Night” his reputation rests in the main on his own, often autobiographical work.

The rawest and most nakedly personal of Potter’s plays is “Moonlight on the Highway”, the story of a man who unsuccessfully seeks to blot out the memory of childhood sexual abuse by fixating on the songs of the 1930s popular singer Al Bowlly.  The use of period music anticipates that of Potter’s two later series, “Pennies from Heaven” and “The Singing Detective”.

Born and raised in Gloucestershire’s Forest of Dean, Potter was from working class stock.  The problems of class and politics inform two early plays “Stand up, Nigel Barton” and “Vote, Vote, Vote for Nigel Barton”. Potter’s regional background is milked in “Pennies from Heaven” - which uses his old school as an actual location - and in the childhood flashback sequences in “The Singing Detective”.

Sexual repression is a theme which Potter consistently returned to, a reflection of his ambiguity about matters carnal.  Himself abused as a boy, he married young in life.  Feeling the need to sexually experiment with prostitutes, he was also revolted by his own disease ridden body.  These mixed feelings come out powerfully in “The Singing Detective”, the tale of an author with skin disease suffering hallucinations in which past and present intermingle with a re-imagining of one the author’s old books as well as the ubiquitous 1930s song and dance numbers.

The musical set pieces in “Pennies from Heaven” and “The Singing Detective” bear surface similarity to those in a conventional Hollywood film of the genre but there are profound, fundamental differences.  There is never any suggestion that Potter characters are doing anything other than lip syncing to the songs of other people.  The music is an ironic commentary on the main narrative, a deconstruction of popular culture, its mythology and its impact on individual psychology.