|
|
|
|
Articles
|
|
|
Articles |
Dennis Potter (1935 - 1994)Dateline: 7th June, 1998 Sunday 7th June sees the fourth anniversary of the death of the "Wildman of British television", Dennis Potter, a writer whose work excited both enthusiasm and hatred, and who delighted the critics and horrified the National Listeners' and Viewers' Assocation. He was not a writer for the theatre (although four of his scripts were turned into stage plays and he did write one for theatre) but for television (although one telescript was seen on-stage ten years before the BBC would show it). For most of his life he suffered, physically, mentally and emotionally. He was still in his twenties when he contracted the disease that was to torture him for the rest of his life, psoriatic arthropathy, which turned his hands into what he described as "clubs". He was a deeply committed socialist, in the 1964 election standing, unsuccessfully, as a Labour candidate, and then wrote Stand Up, Nigel Barton and Vote, Vote, Vote for Nigel Barton, plays which took such a hard look at the Labour Party that it demanded they should be "toned down". On 14th February 1994 - ironically Valentine's Day - he learned that he had terminal cancer of the pancreas and liver. With typical humour and disgust he named his cancer Rupert, after Rupert Murdoch, who represented so much that he hated in British society. He continued to nurse his wife through the breast cancer that was to kill her, and then he died a week later. Biography Dennis Potter didn't need a biographer: he fictionalised his life in his plays. Blue Remembered Hills looks back at his childhood; The Singing Detective echoes his own struggle with illness and, again, looks back at his life as a child in the Forest of Dean; Pennies from Heaven recalls the music which meant so much in his childhood; and Lipstick on Your Collar shows us something of his own National Service. Each of these plays is tinged with darkness. Blue Remembered Hills gives an entirely different slant on childhood by having the boys played by adults, forcing us to contrast the child's view with the reality of adulthood. Had the boys been played by people of their own age, we might have had an nice, nostalgic view of a golden country childhood, but that wasn't Potter's way. Instead we see an almost painful contrast between childhood and adulthood. As for Pennies from Heaven, the songs are the songs of Potter's childhood and in so many ways they are innocent and bright, contrasting sharply with the tale of lust, adultery, deception and murder. The childhood portrayed in The Singing Detective is far from idyllic, but, again, that wasn't Potter's way. For him childhood was "full to the brim with fear, horror, excitement, joy, boredom, love, anxiety." In matters of religion, too, there was the same dichotomy: he knew (and seemed to enjoy) the hymns, but Son of Man and Brimstone and Treacle horrified the church establishment. Theatre For much of his working life Potter did not want to work in theatre. Both the National and the Oxford Playhouse had wanted him to write works for them, but for him theatre was insufficiently democratic. He wanted to reach as wide an audience as possible and so chose television - the "theatre of the people". This did not, however, stop him adapting works for the stage. Vote, Vote, Vote for Nigel Barton was staged in 1968, three years after its TV appearance, and Son of Man was actually staged in the same year as it appeared on TV, 1969. Brimstone and Treacle was performed on-stage long before it was shown on TV. It was produced for the BBC in 1976 but the corporation lost its collective nerve and refused to show it, and the stage version was performed the following year. The film version was released in 1982 and it was eventually shown on TV in 1987. (I haven't been able to track down when Blue Remembered Hills got its first stage outing, but it is now, perhaps, the most produced of his works for the theatre.) His one and only work written purely for the stage was Sufficient Carbohydrate (1983), but it was not a huge success and I have only been able to track down mention of one production since, in Australia - and I have absolutely no details of that. Potter's Influence on TV Drama It has been suggested, by Malcolm Bradbury among others, that Potter's final works Karaoke and Cold Lazarus signalled the end of quality drama on television. It is hard to disagree: Potter's work makes emotional and intellectual demands which modern TV audiences do not seem willing to accept. Perhaps what they do want is "pulp" drama, as Alan Harding suggests. The response to Pride and Prejudice seems to suggest that - forget the satire: swoon over Darcy instead! And yet... Like all great writers, Potter was a one-off. Make no mistake about it, Potter was a great writer, probably the first and, so far, the only one to use the technicalities of the medium to explore the interior of the human psyche. Perhaps we are being unfair to those who came after by expecting them to be him! After all, look at the immediate successors of Shakespeare. Even Ben Jonson pales in comparison. And, in comparison to theatre, TV is but a mewling infant, just passing the crawling stage! Ten years hence we may be able to better assess his influence: now we are too close, not only to the impact he made upon us, but also to the work of his successors. His place in the pantheon of British dramatists is, I submit, assured, but we do other current writers an injustice by expecting them to take up where he left off. Time will tell! Here is a useful and varied collection of links to sites of Dennis Potter interest:
Articles Indices: |
|
|