Potter's Field
[In the following essay Hitchens assesses Potter's life work, his achievements as a writer and his contributions to television and to English society in general.]
You might care to picture this. A man—you may tell by the deference paid him that he is a celebrity of some sort—is being escorted into a television studio. The technical staff is tense and expectant, and the interviewer is grinning with nerves. All this the audience sees, because in a concession to vérité the preliminaries are being broadcast. A certain latitude is permitted to the interview subject, as is obvious from the drink (plainly alcoholic) that is placed before him. And the ashtray. And the flask, which isn't obvious until the subject calls attention to it by asking, "Is that too conspicuous there? I'll only need it if there's any spasms."
The flask contains a cocktail of liquid morphine. And the ashtray is because the patient is past caring about the sagacity of any surgeon general. This is a deathbed interview transferred to a modern setting and a modern set. Dennis Potter knows that he may be gone—really gone—before most people see the show. He also knows that he'll need pain-management techniques to get through the hour. We are watching a dead man on furlough.
Dennis Potter wrote Pennies from Heaven and The Singing Detective. He did the screenplays for Tender Is the Night and Gorky Park. He was once called, by a friend of mine, the Arthur Miller of his generation. When I told Arthur Miller himself that Potter was dying, he was instantly and terribly shocked.
"Dennis Potter was the first writer and perhaps the only one to take television as a new form and to use it as a form of handwriting," he said. "His work is tremendously important for the future, because people can see that the medium need not dictate the mere formula that it so often does now. Potter could convey a true interior, as the films sometimes do and as literature does. He gave television drama its own real personality."
Miller, of course, went from triumph on the stage to a later distinction as someone adapted for movies and for television. With Dennis Potter, the evolution was in the other direction. It was only in 1988 that critic Vincent Canby decided to place all his chips on one square and say (under the heading "Is the Year's Best Film on TV?") that The Singing Detective—which put Chandler's Philip Marlowe through his paces as a child, a fantasist, and an analysand—was "better than anything I've seen this year in the theater (live or dead)." He went on to compare it to Citizen Kane, Napoléon and The Invisible Man. Joseph Papp's Public Theater made a special effort to put the series before the public. Despite having been chosen by only a few PBS stations on its initial run, The Singing Detective made people Potter-conscious. So will the deathbed interview when it is broadcast in this country later this year.
Britain's leading arts broadcaster, Melvyn Bragg, best known to Americans as the host of the South Bank Show, made the interview as a self-contained special and sold it to Britain's Channel Four this past spring. The difficulties of recording it were daunting. Potter's body temperature was fluctuating so much that extra filters were needed to cool the lights, which also had to be kept at the farthest possible distance from him. They could not schedule "breaks," because Potter might (and in fact did) need to resort to the morphine bottle at any time.
"As we settled down," Bragg recalls, "we talked and both of us made that silent pact that can happen before an interview—the decision that we were going to go flat out for it." For days after the show aired, letters and telephone calls came streaming in, and Potter's gritty defiance of extinction became a surefire topic not just at dinner tables but in pubs—partially vindicating his dream that television, properly used, could become the "true national theater."
If you yourself have ever indulged the fantasy of being given, say, six weeks to live, you might like to check your dreams and needs against Potter's flinty stoicism. Emancipated by his intimacy with awaiting death, he elected to keep the appointment by demonstrating an unusual combination of bile and sweetness. Old antagonists such as Rupert Murdoch (with whom Potter has been competing for years for the soul of mass culture) received their blasts of grapeshot. "My cancer, the main one, the pancreas one, I call it Rupert, so I can get close to it, because the man Murdoch is the one who if I had the time—in fact, I've got too much writing to do and I haven't got the energy, but I would shoot the bugger if I could."
On nostalgia, the trope at which he always excelled in his writing and which he once memorably termed "a second-order emotion," he had this to say about his first published book (a study of the British "affluent society" called The Glittering Coffin): "Typical young man's title, you see, typical piece of that sort of humbugging, canting rhetoric which young men—bless their hearts—specialize in. I think we should always look back on our own past with a sort of tender contempt."
The arresting feature of Potter's appearance was his unfeigned ability to speak of himself essentially in the past tense, but without self-pity or sentiment. He had been apprenticed to tough-mindedness in a very hard school. Born to a coal-mining family in the Forest of Dean, which is a sort of English Appalachia in its geographical remoteness as well as its bald-faced lack of amenity, Potter escaped to Oxford as a clever scholarship boy and wrote his first successful play—Stand Up, Nigel Barton—about the hidden injuries of class as they inflicted themselves on the upwardly mobile.
Moving to Fleet Street and on his way to making a success of journalism, he was attacked—"savaged" might not be too strong a word—by the vile and incurable affliction of psoriatic arthropathy. Viewers of his terminal interview gradually noticed that his hands were like gnarled bludgeons and his skin flaky, but that was because he was in relatively good shape. At the worst moments of his illness, he could only move his lips. His own description of the disease:
It was like one of the plagues of Egypt. With 100 percent psoriasis you lose control of your body temperature. You semi-hallucinate. You're in danger of septicaemia, and therefore you're in danger of dying. People say they've got psoriasis, and they mean they've got some really uncomfortable itches, which don't hurt and don't make the skin flake off. With the extreme psoriatic arthropathy that I have you can't find a point of normal skin. Your pores, your whole face, your eyelids, everything is caked and cracked and bleeding, to such a degree that without drugs you could not possibly survive. It was physically like a visitation, and it was a crisis point, an either-or situation: either you give in, or you survive and create something out of this bombsite which you've become—you put up a new building.
He was 26 when he was first flayed by what he later came to call his "shadowy ally." The poet James Fenton recalls visiting him in the hospital two decades ago and seeing piles of human-skin scales lying on and under the bed. But there were medications available that could keep Potter going. Powerful medications, which were later discovered to have carcinogenic side effects, and which eroded his liver and pancreas and slew him at the height of his powers, at the age of 59. A tough sentence. That's about 33 years on the cross—the very place where Potter hung Colin Blakely in his irreligious play Son of Man. But, trite though it surely is to say so, the Potter oeuvre is by no means exclusively bleak. This is partly because Potter understands that illness forced him to discover and develop his real talent.
As he once told Graham Fuller of Interview, "The need to recreate myself coincided with finding the way to do it, which was through drama. I could have gone the 'theater' way or the 'novel' way, but something—maybe the guilt and anxiety about the gap between my origins and what I had become—steered me towards television. The palace of varieties in the corner of the room."
To that palace of varieties, which, as he said, was unlike the theater in that it brought "dons and coalminers" together to watch the same output, Potter devoted his life. He hoped to redeem the mass medium from the lowest common denominator, and did succeed in building a large audience for serious plays.
At one level, it's not hard to see why Arthur Miller esteems Potter so greatly. Pennies from Heaven concerns a traveling salesman of no great polish (played by Bob Hoskins) who hawks sheet music and suffers from the sexual inhibitions of his wife; The corny, uplifting messages of the ballads he peddles nag the salesman, who is called Arthur Parker, to contrast wife with life and life with lyric. Songs such as "The Clouds Will Soon Roll By" come to sound positively dire. Thus, by evoking the music of the people and the easily accessible idioms of mass entertainment. Potter was able to hold attention for something more than a soap opera. Miller told me he'd seen the play on a cassette in London and wondered aloud why such fare was impossible or unthinkable for a mass market in the U.S.A. But actually it was Pennies from Heaven that, with the help of director Herbert Ross, allowed Potter to jump the Atlantic gap and catch Hollywood's attention.
An obliquely related theme, of father-son embarrassment and love, is one which obsessed Potter all his days. Bookish and studious where his father was not, and uneasy about deserting his "roots" in the chronically unfashionable mining community, Potter confessed to Melvyn Bragg in the dying interview that, having so often told his father to leave him alone, he now wished he could say, "'Come on in, Dad, for Christ's sake. Sit down and let … It doesn't matter about that now.'" This was a rare moment of relative clumsiness in Potter's speech, which generally came out in proper sentences, delivered in a fine Gloucestershire accent. In The Singing Detective, the same claim on the dead is made but with much more subtlety, and in words that no one who has lost a parent, or who can imagine such a loss, and who has seen the show is likely to forget:
Are you saying my dad is dead? But no—but you see—there's so much that I want to say—I need to talk to him, very badly…. But he was there—he was!—My lovely dear old dad was there—that was him whistling. I heard him—I heard him! All the birds in the trees—all the love in the world—I heard him. I saw him.
You need an exquisite handling of words to avoid the mawkish, and to get the best out of the semi-articulate. (It was almost impossible to digest the news that, two months after the interview, Potter had to face the death from cancer of his wife, Margaret, who had been his nurse, ally, and comrade for 35 years. Potter himself died a week later, on June 7.)
Potter was a worker, in every sense of that word. Like many English radicals, he possessed a stubborn residual Puritanism that despised and distrusted those who took, or who found, things easy. Also in that tradition, he was conservative about matters such as family, countryside, money, and probity—hence his fierce hatred of things such as Murdoch's instant tabloid commercialism. With his mitts like suppurating claws from disease, he insisted on writing everything in longhand and at night. Whether composing or adapting for the screen, he never objected to putting his labor through another draft unless he thought the pressure was to soften or to blur (or to spare genteel viewers: he had several titanic rows with the BBC on this front).
Restless in his search for new and nongimmicky means of catching and holding attention, Potter had great success with simple but daring ideas. For his television play Blue Remembered Hills (which is almost the perfect title for the evocation of nostalgia) he wondered how to get over the traditional problem of the child actor. Children, he realized, don't make long speeches, and you can't use flashbacks for people with no real memories. But you do need, and children can deliver, "continual, twitchy action."
His solution was to have his group of seven-year-olds played by seven adults. It was a nerve-racking moment in the history of television drama, as he recalled, because of "the panic of the first five minutes, when I think, My God, is this—Colin Welland's great fat ass and great shorts waddling, sploshing through mud, making airplane noises, and chewing on an apple—I thought … it's going to be one of those dire, dread embarrassments, because it ain't gonna work." But the audience saw at once that they were watching children at play, and Blue Remembered Hills is one of the reasons Potter is actually known by name at street level in England. (Another reason was the hatred shown him by the tabloid press, which cordially returned his dislike and used to attack him for obscenity, blasphemy, and elitism. "Television's Mr. Filth" was the title he earned from one Murdoch organ for his play Blackeyes, in which he tried to explore feminism for the first time by depicting the exploitation of fashion models.)
In spite of endless reverses in his personal life, and constant battles over censorship and the limits of good taste, Potter never gave up on the medium of TV and displayed toward it a fidelity which one critic likened to that of a Labrador retriever. This was because, in his culture-starved childhood, he had always had the little window provided by the public-service radio broadcasts of the BBC.
He never forgot the chance encounters with a wider world that this box afforded him. The bigger box, he reasoned, must be even more important and even more worth fighting for. In his last extremity, he battled to finish a play called Karaoke, which took on the idea of virtual virtuosity. "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 appears to a lot of people and feels to a lot of people…. You haven't got much space, and even the space you've got, although you use your own voice, the words are also written for you."
The dumbing-down attempt to script everybody and everything, and to identify the process as popular culture, had what I was going to call an undying foe in Dennis Potter, who was secure enough in his plebeian roots to contest the idea that "the people" wanted what they got, and therefore got what they wanted. I can remember once having him to dinner, along with some very clever television and literary types, all of them used to getting their way on talk shows and at supper tables. Potter didn't say all that much that evening, but his presence in the circle had the amazing effect of making people less glib. They would cast an anxious glance his way before launching and then abandoning some tried and tested piece of hilarious chicanery. I don't mean to make him sound forbidding; it was just that integrity can be as infectious as bullshit. How apt that he should have wasted no material, and enacted his own passing on the small screen, to which he gave his life.
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