Dennis Potter with Melvyn Bragg (interview date March 1994)

SOURCE: An interview in The New York Times, June 12, 1994, p. H30.

[Bragg is an English writer and TV personality. In the following excerpt from an interview first broadcast in England in early 1994, Potter discusses how the knowledge of his imminent death and its attendant physical pain have affected his outlook and his work.]

Given his commitment not to novels or to plays but to what he considered the inherently democratic and implicitly subversive medium of television, it made perfect sense for [Dennis Potter] to make his farewell in a televised interview.

In March, Melvyn Bragg, an English author and television personality, and Michael Grade, the chief executive officer of Channel 4, invited Potter for a televised conversation with Mr. Bragg. The tape was edited by Mr. Bragg and broadcast in Britain on April 5, after which Potter withdrew from public life to concentrate on his last two plays.

The telecast attracted enormous attention in Britain, partly for its almost gruesome intimacy, with Potter twisting nervously in his seat as he let loose with a stream of political polemics, personal justifications and near-religious epiphanies. Particularly discomforting were his occasional swigs of liquid morphine to dull his pain. Potter explored the eerie and insidious effects of morphine in his final work, a short story written last month for The Daily Telegraph of London.

The following is an edited transcript of the Potter-Bragg conversation, which has not been shown in the United States. A footnote: A few days ago, acceding to Potter's plea, Channel 4 and the BBC announced plans to cooperate in the joint presentation, tentatively set for next year, of his final two, now lamentably posthumous, plays, Karaoke and Cold Lazarus.

..…

[Bragg]: How long have you been working on this new thing?

[Potter]: Since I knew what was happening. I hope I've got enough days to finish it. I'm keeping to a very hard schedule, I'm driving myself. Even when I walk up and down—with the pain you sometimes have to keep moving—I still have the pen in my hand to make sure I can put a sentence down when it eases.

It's like that. It keeps me going. There'd be no point in remaining if I didn't, because there's no treatment possible; it's just blanking out pain with morphine. So it's finding a balance—if you blank it out totally, you can't work. It's one of those ratios that you have to work out daily.

How and when did you find out that you'd got this cancer?

Well I knew for sure on St. Valentine's Day—like a little gift, a little kiss from somebody.

I've been working since then flat out at strange hours, because I'm done in the evenings, mostly because of the morphine. Also the pain is very energy-sapping. But I do find that I can be at my desk at 5 in the morning, and I'm keeping to a schedule of pages, and I will and do meet that schedule every day.

Obviously, I had to attend to my affairs as well. I remember reading that phrase when I was a kid: "He had time to tend to his affairs."

But what it's given me also…. As a child, I know for a fact that I was a coward, a physical coward. And I'm really a cripplingly shy person. I hate new situations, new people, with almost a dread.

Now those two consequences in your adult life can really create seriously wrong impressions of yourself, to yourself and to other people, because you try and compensate. That can lead to aggression and the reverse of shy—arrogance, if you like—because you wear it like a cloak. But to let that drop and find out that in fact, at the last, thank God, you're not actually a coward—I haven't shed a tear since I knew. I grieve for my family, and friends who know me closest, obviously, and they're going through it in a sense more than I am.

I've discovered also what you always know to be true, but you never know it till you know it, if you follow. I remember Martin Amis saying something about how when you reach your 40's, middle age, nobody has ever told you what it's like.

Well, it's the same with knowing about death. We're the one animal that knows that we're going to die, and yet we carry on paying our mortgages, doing our jobs, moving about, behaving as though there's eternity in a sense, and we tend to forget that life can only be defined in the present tense.

It is, and it is now only. As much as we would like to call back yesterday and indeed ache to sometimes, we can't. It's in us, but it's not there in front of us. And however predictable tomorrow is, no matter how predictable it is, there's the element on the unpredictable.

..…

That nowness becomes so vivid to me now, that in a perverse sort of way, I'm almost serene, I can celebrate life. Below my window, for example, the blossom is out in full. It's a plum tree. It looks like apple blossom, but it's white. And instead of saying, "Oh, that's nice blossom," looking at it through the window when I'm writing, it is whitest, frothiest, blossomiest blossom that there ever could be.

Things are both more trivial than they ever were, and the difference between the trivial and the important doesn't seem to matter—but the nowness of everything is absolutely wondrous.

And if people could see that—there's no way of telling you, you have to experience it—the glory of it, if you like, the comfort of it, the reassurance…. Not that I'm interested in reassuring people, you know. The fact is that if you see the present tense, boy, do you see it, and boy, can you celebrate it!

You said earlier that it wasn't to do with believing that life was eternal, but have you any feeling from the position you're in, that it might be? You've said that you've never quite thrown off the idea of believing in God, and it features in a lot of your work.

Well, I don't know. God's a rumor, if you like. Christianity or indeed any other religion that is a religion because of fear of death or hope that there is something beyond death does not interest me. What kind of cruel old bugger is God if it's terror that is the ruling edifice, the structure of religion? And too often, for too many people, it is. Now that to me isn't religion.

Religion has always been—I've said it before, but it doesn't matter, I won't get many more chances to repeat myself—thank God, religion to me has always been the wound, not the bandage. I don't see the point of not acknowledging the pain and the misery and the grief of the world, and if you say, "Ah, but God understands" or through that you come to a greater appreciation, I then think, "That's not God, that's not my God, that's not how I see God."

I see God in us or with us, if I see God at all, as shreds and particles and rumors, some knowledge that we have, some feeling why we sing and dance and act, why we paint, why we love, why make art.

All the things that separate us from the purely animal in us are palpably there, and you can call them what you like, and you can theologize about them, and you can build great structures of belief about them. The fact is they are there and I have no means of knowing whether that thereness in some sense doesn't cling to what I call me.

When you knew you had cancer, one of the things you decided to do was write. What are you writing? We're about a month on from when you were told, on Feb. 14.

Yeah, I've done a lot. First of all I was on the point of delivering something that had been commissioned quite a long time ago, called Karaoke, for the BBC.

Although there's a little bit set in the karaoke clubs, obviously karaoke is a metaphor: there's the music, and you have your little line, you can sing it, and everything is written for you, and that is the way life feels to a lot of people. For some, you haven't got much space, and even the space you've got, although you use your own voice, the words are written for you.

I was on the point of delivering it, then as soon as I knew I was going to die, I thought: I can't deliver this, whatever I'm doing now is my last work, and I want to be proud. I want it to be fitting, a memorial, I want to continue to speak.

And at the same time I had this, to me, very exciting idea—I would say that, but I do feel the excitement of it—I'm doing with Channel 4, which I'm calling Cold Lazarus, and you'll see why. I'm trying to join two things together that are currently in the air.

One is virtual reality, where you put on goggles and gloves, and you can land a plane, simulated, or—they hope, and this is the commercial money behind it—you can almost feel that you're having sex with Marilyn Monroe or somebody. Virtual reality will invade the entertainment business but also your own sense of reality.

The other is cryogenics—that is, deep-freeze—technology at absolute zero temperatures. In California they are actually freezing bodies of people, very rich people—and there are some corporations making quite a lot of nice money out of this—for eventual regeneration, when they can cure whatever it is they died of. They've honed that down now, I discover. They only need to freeze the head. They've managed apparently to regenerate some frozen rat brain cells.

I have this series, where there's the head in its case, and all the electrodes are attached to it, and as they gradually allow and stimulate the billions upon billions of brain cells, they discover that one's alive and there is memory there everywhere, real memory.

We're talking about 400 years from now, and that real memory is of the 1930's, 1940's, 1950's, 1960's, in other words, my memories or what I choose to make my memories. And to stimulate those memories, they have to use virtual-reality memories as well.

Now what I want to do, and I'm floating this now publicly, so I'm going to compromise some people. Karaoke is BBC. Cold Lazarus is Channel 4. I want the man whose head is in the box, spilling out memories of the real world that I know, to be the man who is the central character of Karaoke.

All I hope is that I've got enough days to finish it, and I'm working all the hours I can. I've got a doctor, Paul Downey, whose name should be celebrated if I do finish this, who has so gently and carefully led me to a balance between pain control and mental control, where I can work. He's given me the liberty, and he's had the intelligence to see that I can create a space to do 10 pages a day, flat out.

When I go flat out, I go flat out and with a passion I've never felt. I feel I can write anything at the moment. I feel I can fly with it. I feel I can really communicate what I'm about, and what I feel.

My only regret would be to die four pages too soon. If I can finish, then I'm quite happy to go. I don't mind. I am quite serene. I haven't had a single moment of terror since they told me. I know I'm going to die, whether it's in four weeks' time, five, six. It might be longer—I might make eight, nine, ten, who knows?

The histology of it suggests that I should already be dead, but I know what's keeping me going…. I've written so much of it I know, and I've got the same feeling that I had with Singing Detective and Pennies From Heaven and Blue Remembered Hills, only more so. I would go out with—I can now be arrogant and boastful—I could go out with a fitting memorial.

That'll have to do. I'm done.