Dennis Potter
[In the essay below, Purser examines Potter's work in chronological order, exploring connections to biography, Potter's developing aesthetic and thematic interests and ideas about the medium of television.]
Dennis Potter's titles are meticulously chosen even when they're filched from popular songs, but none gives such a clue to the ruling passion of his work as the one he picked for a now forgotten—indeed, lost—little play of 1966, Emergency Ward 9. It was, obviously, set in hospital, which was a recent experience of Potter's, and one unfortunately to be repeated many times, but the theme is not noticeably derived from personal suffering, nor in fact much concerned with suffering at all. It's a slight comedy of attitudes between patients in the ward, one unruly and working class, one prim and middle class, one black. The point is that Potter seemed deliberately to be adapting the formula of the popular hospital soap operas of the day, and was quite certainly echoing—down to the way it was universally misread—the name of the most popular of all. Emergency—Ward 10 was the first twice-weekly serial on British television, running from 1957 to 1967. Though it was supposed to roam over all the departments of a big general hospital, with Ward 10 a purely representative location for the drama and urgency invoiced in the title, its devotees steadfastly ignored the dash whenever they talked about their favourite programme, thereby transforming it into the annals of a mythical 'emergency ward' where all the hopes, disasters, sunshine and tears of hospital life could be handily concentrated. In this respect they displayed a better understanding of the nature of soap opera than the programme-makers, and Potter followed suit. The play affirmed his allegiance to television as the true national theatre and common culture of the people. That was the audience he wanted to reach, though it was to be many years before he achieved anything like mass popularity in terms of ratings. He is, or at least was until 1979, extraordinarily indifferent to the stage adaptations he occasionally made from his television originals, or to the two or three screen plays he has written to commission; while frequently and publicly despairing of the use made of television both at the sending and the receiving ends, he remains its ardent champion.
Dennis Christopher George Potter was born in 1935 in the village of Berry Hill in the Forest of Dean, the son of a coalminer. Every writer is the product of his upbringing, but here time and place and community conspired together with unusual attention to detail. A working-class background (or working-class passport, as Alan Brien has termed it) was almost a literary requisite in the early sixties, in the wake of Alan Sillitoe and Shelagh Delaney and Billy Liar, and the best qualification of all was a dad out of the pits. So many gnarled specimens were depicted in films and plays, failing to understand their soft, déclassé sons, that by the end of the decade the funny television show Monty Python's Flying Circus could mount an inversion of the formula in which the father, now a scarred old author, berated the son for opting for the security of a well-paid job at the coalface. 'Civic luncheons, lad? Ah've eaten more civic luncheons than tha've had hot dinners.' It is a small but impressive indication of the vigour of Potter's dialogue and characterisation that Lay Down Your Arms (1970) went out only a few weeks later containing the straight-forward version (coalminer father, scholarship boy) and still managed to give the scene freshness and love. Potter's relationship with his father, whom he had also 'put' into Stand Up, Nigel Barton, as finely played by Jack Woolgar, was exceptionally close, and the strains of finding himself drawn into a world far removed from his home and family were very real.
The Forest of Dean is, or was in Dennis Potter's formative years, a peculiarly remote, inward-turned corner of England. 'Enclosed, tight, backward' were his own adjectives I quoted in a magazine profile. Until he left home he had never seen a flush toilet or a washbasin with running water. The slops were thrown on to the vegetable patch as fertiliser. There were neighbours who had never been out of the Forest in their lives. And although the working population was an industrial one, the scenery was as rural as that of Hardy's Wessex. Directly or indirectly it is the setting for a great deal of his invention. When Potter was fourteen the family moved to London, staying with relatives in Hammersmith. After two and a half years Potter's father tired of odd jobs in the building trade and went back to the Forest and the mines; but Dennis, doing well at St Clement Dane's Grammar School, stayed on. Hammersmith, especially Hammersmith Bridge, is another favourite location.
He won a place at New College, Oxford and after two years' national service which we will consider when they surface in dramatic form went up to read Philosophy, Politics and Economics. Brought up in a solidly Labour, chapelgoing community he threw himself into left-wing politics but also acted, debated and edited Isis. In his third year he wrote his first book, The Glittering Coffin, a swipe at Oxford, the class system and metropolitan culture in the mood of the 'angry young men' of the day. Like many an undergraduate shocker, it was written with one eye on Fleet Street and the hope of attracting an offer, as a notorious young writer, from one of the papers. This came to pass for Potter but not immediately, for The Glittering Coffin was not published until 1962 and in the meantime he had been accepted as a BBC general trainee, the one lucky spermatozoon from the hundreds of arts graduates who used to apply every year at this time. Potter worked on Panorama and according to popular legend wrote his first-ever lines of dialogue when for an early book programme he furnished the little dramatised excerpts from novels which were then thought to be the only way of making literature visual.
His most important assignment, though, was to work with the film-maker Denis Mitchell, under whose supervision Potter wrote and directed a documentary called Between Two Rivers (1960) about his beloved Forest of Dean and the threat to its particularity posed by television and the Light Programme and advertising and all the other manifestations of a popular, generalised culture. The angry tone of the commentary caused most comment, anger still being a quality eagerly sought in young men. I quote from my review in the old News Chronicle, not with any great satisfaction but because it is to hand and because I spotted the fact that Potter was to some extent putting it on.
He hates the idea of this once-proud, distinctive mining area becoming submerged in a colourless, supermarket England. He hates status-seeking, hidden persuasion, the acquisitive urge, publicists, pop music and pop TV. He likes brass bands, pubs, working men's clubs, Methodist chapels, independence and that most comforting of concepts, 'community'.
Most young men of sensibility could produce a similar reaction, and in his vehemence Mr. Potter came close to over-stating his case. People and places that on his own admission had oppressed and confined him only three or four years earlier were now bathed in golden approval. Though it was a shame the old pub was to be modernised. I must say it was pretty bleak as it stood.
Potter's relationship to at least two of the bogeys on that list (television and popular music) must have been ambivalent even then. Certainly he went over the same ground in a much less strident and more tolerant—indeed, often gentle—voice in a monograph called The Changing Forest (1962) for a Secker & Warburg series to the brief of 'Britain Alive'. Meanwhile Between Two Rivers had failed to please his superiors at the BBC. Denis Mitchell took no more pupils. Dennis Potter, disillusioned with broadcasting and impatient of the political neutrality expected of broadcasting, went off to the Daily Herald as a leader-writer. The episode was an early demonstration of the Potter knack of generating controversy, but it may have left scars of a different—and graver—sort. He already felt guilty about the elitist education (as he called it) which separated him from his working-class compeers. The reactions of family and friends and neighbours to his film made him secretly afraid that he had patronised them, made use of them and, worst of all, pronounced upon them. In later years he would sometimes date his illness from this moment.
In November 1962 the BBC launched its satirical Saturday night That Was The Week That Was, which became first a national sensation, then a national institution. Potter and a Herald colleague, David Nathan, formed one of the writing partnerships that flocked to exercise their wits on the lovely new audience that was suddenly available, a bourgeoisie waiting to be affronted. By definition most of the material was pretty ephemeral, but a reminder of four or five Nathan-Potter contributions is preserved in print in a TWTWTW compilation. Two of them are openly political: the Conservative Party had just issued a pamphlet tearing some Labour proposals out of context, so Nathan and Potter applied the same technique and same rhetoric to the Tory record; neater and more enduring, really, because it draws on a recurring human foible, is a sequence of remarks made about Clement Attlee by his political adversaries over the years, gradually warming from hostility to benign approval as Attlee passes out of power and into history. The item likeliest to be remembered, however, was called 'Mother's Day'.
What is a Mum?
A Mum lives with a Dad and 2.4 children in a rented house where the neighbours notice her washing on the line. A Mum relies upon secret ingredients and instant cake-mixes. She has kids with dirty teeth who regularly shout 'Don't forget the Fruit Gums, Mum.' A Mum is full of faith. She thinks every wash-day is a miracle. And since she adds the extra egg to everything except the bacon, she is probably constipated as well.
And so on. If wit was shit, as they say in Suffolk, tha'd be constipated, too, Dennis and David. But it was a neat enough concatenation of all the most grating assumptions aired in the TV commercials of the day, and with Mum impersonated by Rose Hill it seemed at the time to be a funny and scathing aperçu, as well as an early example of the obsession with the ruses of advertising which was to colour several of Dennis Potter's plays.
While covering a political progress by Hugh Gaitskell for the Daily Herald, Potter suddenly felt his knee lock as he was trailing along the street in the wake of the party. It was the first serious intimation of the mysterious illness, eventually diagnosed as psoriatic arthropathy, which was to beset him on and off—but increasingly on—for the next fifteen years. He would suffer intense skin irritation coupled with painful stiffening of the joints; his hands in particular were affected, in the end permanently. Treatment by various drugs brought some relief but distressing side-effects. Only the intervention of doctors who read of his plight and suggested, in 1977, a trial with a new drug, Razoxin, finally brought about a substantial and sustained improvement in his health.
One immediate consequence of his illness was that Potter had to be taken off his existing duties at the Daily Herald. The paper gave him the job which he wryly defined as the refuge of the sick and the crippled, that of television critic. Actually, morning-paper reviewing was quite a nervy task when a good deal of television was still live and there were few previews for the press. Some hundreds of words of judgement might have to be telephoned in by a deadline only five minutes after the show finished. Potter evidently enjoyed both the subject and the spontaneity demanded of him. Television could be 'dreary, repetitive, sordid, commercial and second-rate', he had written in The Changing Forest, and it was regrettable that this was so often what the folks chose to watch; but television was also the only unstuffy medium capable of reaching everyone and independent of the snobberies and superiorities of an educationally privileged minority. To yell for the best in television and deride the worst was an honourable calling; and what truer, less stuffy way of doing it than by spilling out the hot reaction, without the opportunity to sit down and compose mandarin second thoughts? Though after two years Potter took advantage of a period of remission in his illness to pursue an old ambition to enter politics, and never returned to a staff job on a newspaper, the instant satisfactions of journalism would always attract him. He wrote a personal column for his old paper—by now the Sun—in the mid-sixties; he contributed book reviews to The Times, and throughout most of the seventies acted as television critic first for the New Statesman, then The Sunday Times. Whether he applied to these last tasks the whoopee-doo of extemporisation I don't know, but he told me once that his measured book pieces for The Times were sketched out only in note form and then ad-libbed over the telephone to a patient Printing House Square copytaker. By this time, it has to be added, his hands were irretrievably injured by the illness; typing was out of the question, and dictation to a typist, judging by the fury it induced in the temporarily crippled writer-hero of Only Make Believe (1973), did not suit him. He had to master a new longhand with pen wedged in his fist, and while it is unlikely that this necessity will have much affected his dramatic works, his only published novel Hide and Seek is written in such an obsessive prose that you can almost see, through the print, the lined paper and crabbed racing hand.
Potter stood as a Labour candidate in the 1964 General Election that brought Labour back into power after thirteen years, but against Derek Walker-Smith in the safe Tory seat of Hertfordshire East a young and emotional Tyro stood little chance. Potter found the campaign exhausting and the baby-kissing and glad-handing sickening. Politics were not for him. He now knew for certain that what he wanted was to be a writer. Like most young journalists, he had started a novel in his spare time. A friend, Roger Smith, had become a story editor in BBC television drama. Why didn't Dennis turn his plot into a television play instead? If accepted, it would bring a much quicker return than slogging on to complete the statutory seventy thousand words and then waiting the best part of a year for publication. And, of course, it was in accord with all his cultural ideals. Potter accepted the suggestion and with it a challenge that might have been framed for him.
The Confidence Course went out as a Wednesday Play in February 1965. The plot concerns a trio of smooth operators endeavouring to enroll a group of potential pupils into a personality class supposed to make the recipient happier, more successful and, obviously, more confident. They are defeated by a kind of Holy Fool among the aspirants who keeps breaking in with dissertations on such Potterish preoccupations as the advertisements in the London Underground and finally, by casting doubts on the list of attributes the Confidence Course claims to bring out, converts everyone back to the comfort of being unconfident. It seemed to me at the time to be a consummation rather too easily obtained, but, alas, nothing of the production survives. In the expressive and understandably aggrieved jargon of the National Film Archive, the recording has long since been 'junked'. Nor is it the only one. The tapes of Message for Posterity (1967) and Angels Are So Few have also been wiped. Emergency Ward 9 belonged to a fad for half-hour studio plays on both BBC-2 and ITV (Rediffusion) around 1966–7 prompted partly by stinginess, partly by a kind of Pre-Raphaelite urge to get back to the roots of television drama as a live, compact, enclosed performance, and by definition has vanished into the great blue yonder. Cinderella was rejected at the script stage, though not without earning the author some of his customary publicity in the process. Shaggy Dog (1968) I saw but have quite forgotten. Scripts, of course, exist, and in one or two cases I have consulted them to check points of detail; but Potter has written somewhere of the 'soup' of television, the non-stop swirl of sport and news and second-hand movies and idiot panel games from which every programme has to sing out or go under. In braver moments he has intimated that he likes his own work to be experienced in this context rather than in the isolation of the Steenbeck Room, so I propose to pay him the compliment of relying chiefly on what the good critic Maurice Richardson used to call the cauliflower-shaped tape-recorder.
In his first fifteen years as a television dramatist Potter completed twenty-five single plays, of which all but Cinderella were produced, though another was famously never transmitted; two original six-part serials; and two serials and one single episode adapted from literature. Though many of them reveal recurring obsessions, and some of them even share a circumstance in the plot, to try and classify the single plays alone would require one of those complicated patterns of eccentric and partially overlapping circles—however recognisable the tone of voice may be. The nearest thing to a common factor is that most of the time Potter is dealing in what he has himself defined as 'interior drama'.
I'm much more concerned with interior drama than with external realities. Television is equipped to have an interior language. Certainly one of the strands in TV drama is that of the interiorising process, the concern with people's fantasies and feelings about the shape of their lives, and about themselves. It seems very important to me that television should be concerned with that, because the people watching it are watching it in a very peculiar way, with all their barriers down. You've got a huge audience on the one hand, and yet it's also a series of very informal, very tiny audiences, multiplied X times, and the interior drama, if you like to call it such, can work in those conditions almost better than anything.
This pronouncement comes from Paul Madden's useful interview with Dennis Potter in the duplicated programme to the season of British Television Drama held at the National Film Theatre in October 1976. Potter was represented by his two Nigel Barton plays from late 1965 and, pausing only to forgive him for 'interiorising', we might as well deal with them at this point. Both are autobiographical, though Potter was at pains in the same Madden interview to stress that he likes using only the external circumstances of his own life. The hero's hopes, fears, fantasies and revulsions are not necessarily his own. The autobiographical element is a framework for the play rather than the play itself. Vote, Vote, Vote for Nigel Barton was written first, as an angry lampoon on politics inspired by his Hertfordshire candidature but owing something to TWTWTW and his two years as a critic. Having been on the receiving end of so much television drama, he told Madden, he was anxious not to furnish merely more of the same when he changed roles. He wanted to use a brisker narrative style and, in particular, experiment with direct address to the audience. A political subject with everyone making speeches was obviously suitable. It is interesting to note how in Pennies from Heaven thirteen years later Potter—or his director then. Piers Haggard—used the same, it by now familiar, device of opening on the politician as if he is making a speech direct to camera and only pulling back after a moment to relocate him within the geography of the play.
Stand Up, Nigel Barton, which fortuitously went out first, is the better play in Potter's own opinion. Certainly his command of what is soon to become the identifiable Potter style is surer, though there is also an early warning, in an Oxford party scene populated by vapid upper-class undergraduates, of the rather silly and curiously anachronistic caricatures Potter sometimes draws instead of characters. The action flicks to and fro between present and remembered lime to follow Nigel through the same convulsive process that heaved his creator from miner's cottage to dreaming spires, only instead of making a television film Nigel takes part in one. He watches it with his family at home. His father sweeps out in disgust. Nigel catches him up and they head for the pub together, but the last scene direction in the published script has father and son walking away from the camera 'separated by a mutual anxiety'.
The most original device in Stand Up is to have all the children in the remembered classroom scenes, including Nigel himself, played by adult actors 'imitating childish manners and movements in a horribly precise style'. It is possible that Potter had seen an item in the current-affairs programme Tonight in which a number of adult contributors to a collection of memoirs called John Bull's Schooldays were sat at little school desks to discuss the book. It was still a brilliant extension of the conceit to apply it to drama; Nigel is one minute able to address the viewers directly with the hindsight of the man and lapse the next into the boy taking the first steps along the road to the scholarship that is to distance him from his fellows. And a sharp, unexpected reminder of the nature of childhood comes from seeing actors slipping into the giggles, snivels, innocences, treacheries and capricious alliances of infancy. Fourteen years later Potter expanded the novelty into the whole device of his little masterpiece Blue Remembered Hills.
The remaining play written to the autobiographical convention is Lay Down Your Arms (1970), which drew on Potter's two years' national service between school and Oxford. In company with Michael Frayn and other misfits he was sent on one of the army's celebrated crash language courses which had been instituted to provide an ample supply of interpreters should the Cold War produce some warmer skirmishes, and ended up as a Russian-language clerk in the War Office. What the play makes of this employment is a good illustration of the liberties Potter feels free to take with his own—or anyone else's-history. He deferred the action a year or two in order to have it taking place during the Suez crisis, a time of righteous indignation for all left-wing writers, added a visit by the Moscow Dynamo football team for good measure and converted the bunch of officers with whom his hero had to work into a collection of upper-class numskulls as caricatured as anyone in Nigel Barton.
One tiny bit of business remains sharply in my mind after more than ten years: the ritual of the morning coffee or afternoon tea, with the clerk carrying a tray of mugs to each officer in turn for the drill of being offered first the sugar and then the use of the communal stirrer. Obviously it was an even more vivid memory to Potter, perhaps because it encapsulated a distinction between officers and other ranks which seemed especially fatuous and especially humiliating when everyone was in civilian clothes. Potter uses it in drawn-out detail, twice if not three times, as a piece of the apparatus of life he reproduces very carefully while whizzing off in all directions for the imaginative content of his plays. Here, he never quite settles whether to go for a serious diatribe (Suez), a farcical climax (his hero trapped by his fantasies into impersonating the Dynamo goalkeeper) or a happy ending (anxious quest for a girl friend succeeding at last). The production was nevertheless an entertaining instance of what might be called the virtues of transience in television drama, which is something I want to expand on later but brutally simplify just now to mean that at the particular season it went out, the play's evocation of another particular season seemed very apt. Though it wasn't the first time Potter had taken his title from a popular song and used the same song on the sound-track, it was, until Pennies from Heaven the only occasion on which the song was at all contemporaneous with the events of the play, and belted out by Anne Shelton in the authentic mid-fifties version it carried all sorts of resonances—not quite nostalgia, more than simple remembrance—besides furnishing an ironic chorus to the martial and amatory strands of the story. Potter and the director, Christopher Morahan, also demonstrated a casual mastery of the narrative devices which Potter now commanded: newsreel clips, overlapping voices, flashbacks, a little play within the play and that familiar scene between coalminer father and grammar-school son which even Monty Python hadn't been able to blight.
A natural companion piece to Lay Down Your Arms, if more sombre in tone, is Traitor (1971). Potter's renegade British agent self-exiled in Moscow has some antecedents in common with Kim Philby, including a responsibility for the betrayal and death of former allies, but biography is no more Potter's concern here than self-revelation is in his autobiographical pieces or Christology in Son of Man. It is an attempt to bring alive as 'Adrian Harris' one kind of person who might have behaved as Philby did and offer an explanation of why he did so. The proposition of the play is beautifully explicit, with a party of English correspondents climbing flight after flight of stairs to their quarry's bleak Moscow flat, speculating the while as to why he has invited them and what they will hear. And notice again this curious whiff of impermanence about the production (director, Alan Bridges), as if it were deliberately geared to transmission at this very conjunction of the planets on 14 October 1971. Instead of one of the heavyweight actors who might have been expected. Bridges cast as Harris John Ie Mesurier, an actor identified not merely with comedy but with the immensely popular Dad's Army, then in the third year of a run which lasted from 1969 to 1978. By being such a familiar of the screen, I noted at the time, he lent proceedings 'a curious and rather valuable quality of being about someone whose picture really was on the front pages day after day, a while ago now'.
Potter's explanation of Harris's behaviour is revealed by the characteristic injection of flashbacks and lightning interior images as he answered his visitors: childhood under the shadow of an eminent archaeologist father, the one direct borrowing from Philby's background; schooldays transposed from the village primary of Potter's experience to a posh prep school but with Authority stamping down even more harshly on childish individuality and infirmity, e.g. the young Adrian viciously persecuted for stuttering over a line from Blake; the upper-class mill grinding on through public school and Oxbridge to the Foreign Office, while in newsreel clips the poor languished in slums and the unemployed marched.
'Traitor?' muses the exile in his Moscow flat,'—to my class, yes. Not to my country, not to England.' For his England is the England of Constable landscapes and, ironically, the romantic socialist visions of the very poet for whom he had been made to suffer in the classroom. His hatred is of his upbringing, not his fellow countrymen, but by a further irony it is his upbringing which had prevented him from ever knowing his fellow countrymen. Only to an ex-public schoolboy in the party of journalists, significantly, can he really make himself understood. If less glib and more sophisticated an explanation than I have perhaps made it sound, in retrospect it is still not strong enough to support the disconcerting durability of a Philby's or an Adrian Harris's convictions. Not for the first time, the play itself seemed less persuasive than the glittering extemporisation on patriotism and treason which Potter delivered on Late Night Line-Up afterwards. Who was it that, in praising Shaw's prefaces, wondered why he bothered to append those silly little plays?
Potter's own patriotism is intense and localised. He did not go abroad for the first time until well past forty. Even to venture out of England for the 1977 Edinburgh TV Festival was an ordeal, he told the delegates. His England is the Forest of Dean, Hammersmith Bridge and a fervent old-fashioned socialism rooted in chapel and pit. His scorn for the superficial, flag-waving, who-won-the-war-then patriotism is correspondingly fierce. But so is a distrust of foreigners and foreign influence which can only be described as xenophobic. When these two impulses coincide, as they did in the thoroughly bad and best forgotten The Bonegrinder (1968), it is difficult not to suspect that it is Dennis Potter himself, like one of his Puritans who protest too vehemently at filth and unchastity, who is secretly and ashamedly the Little Englander.
Traitor slides us towards the plots which Potter has acquired from legend or observation rather than from his own depths, and which therefore tend to take place a little less inside the head. In this early-to-middle period, Alice (1965) is a sympathetic study of Lewis Carroll, Where the Buffalo Roam (1966) a lurid parable about a youth with a Wild West fixation, Message for Posterity (1967) the clash of an indubitably Churchillian elder statesman with the doughty old painter who has come to do his portrait. The most interesting, on several counts, is A Beast with Two Backs (1968), which Potter took from a Forest of Dean story he had perhaps heard as a boy, of how the locals once attacked and killed a dancing bear which came wandering into the area. Potter gives the episode an authentic folktale atmosphere while rooting it firmly in period (the 1890s) and place. It is the only play of his set solely and specifically in the Forest and the first to be shot (by the veteran director Lionel Harris) wholly on film. But I suppose the piece which still dominates this particular batch is Son of Man (1969). Potter wrote it at a bad time in his illness and a time of change in his political convictions. He was still a socialist, as he is today, but during the revolutionary fever of 1968 he happened to come into contact with some of the leading zealots and was suddenly disenchanted with the materialism of their aspirations. From childhood he had been susceptible to the intimidating face of religion—in an oft-quoted reminiscence, the Valley of the Shadow of Death was, for little Dennis, a sunken lane near his home down which he scuttled with his heart in his mouth. Now in his pain and his disillusionment, he saw the reverse side. He was overcome by—and wished to communicate—the enormity, as he put it, of Jesus's simple message of love.
It is difficult now to evaluate either that 1969 production or the script underlying it. The common reaction was respect rather than enthusiasm among those disposed to accept the play, resentment rather than indignation among those who disliked Potter's indifference to the divinity of Christ and concentration on the humanity of Jesus. The scene everyone remembers is Colin Blakeley, as a muscular, earthy, journeyman carpenter of a Messiah slapping the cross (in an early confrontation with the machinery of crucifixion) and lamenting the abuse of good timber which might have been turned into tables or chairs. Otherwise it seems to be one of the few Potter plays which somehow missed the tide when they were first done, and it will be seen clearly to be a HIT or a MISS only if it is one day reproduced, with different actors, a different attack and a different set of expectations.
Seven plays written between 1970 and 1976 are linked by filaments sometimes so fine that they seem only to be coincidences, the author nodding over his typewriter and inadvertently punching up the exact sentiment he gave another character in another world, sometimes so specific—in the production and casting if not in the text—that the connection is proclaimed. In Only Make Believe (1973), a play about the writing of a television play, and more particularly the use an author makes of his own experiences, the play in question is Angels Are So Few (1970), and clips from it are sewn into the action. As an extra nudge in the BBC production, the actor playing the author was Keith Barron, previously Nigel Barton in the Nigel Barton plays. The relationship between an author and his character is also the device of the novel Hide and Seek, which, published in 1976, is clearly an honorary member of this group. The relationship between an author and the actor—or in this case, actress—inspiring his play is one of the concerns of Double Dare (1976). The relationship between an actor and the parts he plays is the sour joke of Follow the Yellow Brick Road (1972).
Another regular obsession is voiced by Jack Black, the paranoid hero of that play and star of the dreadful TV commercials which punctuate its narrative. Despite the ignominy of being pushed into a pond by a Great Dane avid for Waggytail Din-Din or creeping downstairs in the dead of night to catch his wife at the Krispy Krunch biscuits, he professes to prefer the sunny world of the commercials, where families are happy and husbands and wives love each other, to the sordid home truths of the television drama of the day.
JACK. Filth—that's what oozes out of these plays. Filth of all kinds to mock virtue and to encourage doubts. They turn gold into hay, these people. Angels into whores. Love into a s-s-sticky slime—and Jesus Christ into an imbecile bleeding and screaming on a cross. God! I hate them. I bloody hate them, and their rotten, festering, suppurating scabs of ideas!
Potter is, of course, settling a few old scores. The language is the language of the most ignorant and least temperate among those who sought to 'clean up' television at this time. 'Filth' was almost an obligatory word. In just such terms had Potter's own plays been described: the angels turned into whores may be a sly reference to Angels Are So Few; the line about Jesus Christ is certainly an allusion to Son of Man. But Black is no yahoo. He is the hero of this play, the character with whom the audience is invited to identify. In common with other Potter characters, and for that matter with a substantial section of humanity, he is both attracted and repelled by sex; the panting excitement of the moment is instantly followed by a Swiftean disgust with the bodily plumbing involved; ideals of love and ethereal sensation wither before the readiness of others to feign, sell or otherwise betray their intimacies. In Jack Black's case the revulsion dates from the discovery, glimpsed in flashback, of his wife not at the Krispy Krunches but satisfying a rather different appetite, with a naked man. In Double Dare, by a complete reversal, the playwright's disgust is focussed on a commercial made by the actress he wants, in both senses, in which she was evidently willing to fake the most intimate caress available to a woman in order to sell a chocolate bar.
Illusion and reality, performance as against genuine behaviour, the transmutation of life into fiction, the consolations of fantasy, the eternal struggle between the id and the ego—the permutations are always ingenious, often funny and made absolutely plain by Potter's technique, now fully developed, of cutting instantaneously between present and past, between objective and subjective versions of events. But it has to be said that the interplay of author and character or actor and role cannot help seeming too easy, too private a metaphysical concern. It's one that any writer is going to have his nose rubbed in; it is not one that necessarily fascinates everyone else. Certainly the most exciting—if ultimately disappointing—of the seven plays, Double Dare, toys with an altogether more heady set of speculations. The actress playing the actress who is helping the dramatist overcome a nasty case of Writer's Block also plays a call-girl visiting a boorish, red-faced client in the same hotel. Cross-cutting between the room dominated by the typewriter and the room dominated by a bed makes a familiar Potter connection between sex and creativity. But what is this trick of the dramatist's of anticipating what the girl is going to say? Why does he keep quoting from Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Sudden Light?
I have been here before,
But when or how I cannot tell:
I know the grass beyond the door,
The sweet keen smell,
The sighing sound, the lights around the shore.
It looks as if Potter is going to explore something he hasn't explored before, the possibility much loved by J. B. Priestley and of appeal to anyone who has experienced one of those sensations of déjà vu, that time unfolds in loops and there may be a Second Chance or at least some precognition of things to come. But he settles for a variant on the solipsist dénouement he has already used in Schmoedipus (1974): actress and whore are the same person and the red-faced client is the writer's alter ego: it's all in the mind.
Schmoedipus is one of three or four plays in the group sharing the same little circumstance of a young man who turns up on the doorstep of a private house and claims acquaintance with someone within. In Schmoedipus it is the housewife, and he says he is her long-lost son, which she is delighted to accept; but in the end—if much more skillfully and compassionately than this bald summary can indicate—he is revealed to be a figment of her guilt and yearnings. In Joe's Ark (also 1974) the visitor is real and legitimate and means well, a friend from student days of the young girl in the house who is dying of cancer. In Brimstone and Treacle, recorded in 1976 but never transmitted, he is still real, if hardly human and certainly not legitimate. He is a genuine devil complete with cloven feet; his pretence of having known the now brain-damaged, inanimate daughter of the house is a whopping lie; and he means very badly indeed. His sexual possession of her body—twice—is truly shocking. But it achieves what all her parents' wan efforts have failed to bring about: it jolts her back into sapient life. Potter is deliberately inverting the proposition of Angels Are So Few (which had a real angel) and the pieties of Joe's Ark to see if the other side has anything to offer. 'Why don't people accept evil when they are offered it?' the little demon wonders, genuinely puzzled.
Denied transmission by Alasdair Milne, then BBC Director of Programmes, Brimstone and Treacle became the focus of much agitation about censorship. The text was published first in the New Review, then as a paperback. The tape was shown on closed circuit at the 1977 Edinburgh Television Festival at which Potter was due to speak, and delegates were moved to send a telegram of protest to Milne. A stage version was produced shortly afterwards (October 1977) at the Studio Theatre, Sheffield; a further production was mounted at the Open Space, London, in February 1979. Alasdair Milne's grounds for his decision were that the rape scenes would provoke such outrage that Potter's 'point of serious importance' would be prevented from getting across, and certainly it is not easy to watch an inanimate girl being unbuttoned—or in the Sheffield stage version, even more explicitly, having her plastic pants lowered—preparatory to being violated. But rationally it is the outcome of the assault which demands the bigger swallow of acceptance. Is Pattie's (the girl's) reclamation any less fortuitous a turn-up than one I still remember from a boy's magazine story and rejected as unlikely even at the age of ten, whereby the hero took his crippled friend for a ride on his motor-bike, they crashed, the friend's leg was injured, but at the hospital, gosh, they found that the new injury had corrected the old infirmity? After all, brain damage is usually held to be irreversible. I believe that Potter does make the miracle work, if only because a miracle is obviously admissible in any play that contains a paid-up supernatural being. Where, on reflection, he forfeits the more extravagant claims made for Brimstone after its banning is in what look suspiciously like stand-by elements in the plot. One is a set of National Front attitudes on the part of the girl's father, which he is made to re-examine by the visitor's acting, appropriately, as Devil's Advocate as he leads the conversation to the logical conclusion of concentration camp and gas chamber. The other is a tatty little injection of secret guilt into the father's concern for Pattie. The accident which turned her into a cabbage, it transpires, happened as she ran headlong from discovering Daddy in the arms of her best friend.
The poor bastard has enough sadness to bear, you might think, without this added burden. An interpretation, I suppose, is that the demon doesn't really exist—he is the phantom representation of Daddy's secret self just as the client is the playwright's secret evil self in Double Dare or the visitor in Schmoedipus is the heroine's phantom son—but to support this logically the paternal lusts should have been directed at Pattie herself, not at her friend. Potter has written of the fierce religious beliefs he absorbed in the revivalist chapels of his boyhood, the certainty that there was an eagle-eyed God noting every sin and programming due retribution. It looks here, as it looks in many of his works, as if he is still reluctant to accept that ill fortune can descend at random and needs at all costs to trace it back to one fatal lapse. In this respect he follows the author he presumably much admires and has twice adapted for television, Thomas Hardy. The trouble is that the visual shorthand he employs is always in danger of seeming too glib, too mechanical. These recurring scenes, flashes of memory, fleeting visions, are removed only in style from the ponderous flashbacks, invoiced by a rippling screen or echoing music, at which we smile in old Hollywood epics.
All television drama is collaborative, and Dennis Potter's connection with a comparatively small number of producers and directors has been vital to his developing confidence as a writer. No fewer than nine of his early plays were directed by Gareth Davies. Barry Davis, Alan Bridges and, more recently, Brian Gibson have each directed at least two plays. But the relationship with the producer, who in television acts as impresario, moving spirit and buffer between the author and everyone else, has evidently been even more important to Potter. Kenith Trodd, a friend from early political days, is a former story editor at the BBC (he worked on Emergency Ward 9). In 1968 with Tony Garnett, David Mercer and the late James MacTaggart he set up an independent production company. Kestrel Productions, for whom Potter wrote Moonlight on the Highway (1969). When Kestrel folded after a few years in the face of the programme companies' reluctance to share whatever credit was available with a subcontractor, Trodd became a straightforward freelance producer and the man who has nursed most of Potter's later works on to the air. Their maiden collaboration, Moonlight on the Highway, is not only an adroit and intriguing comedy but also Potter's first real raid on the mythology of popular music. His hero runs a society dedicated to the memory of Al Bowlly, the crooner killed in the London Blitz; Bowlly's songs swirl in and out of the action, his photographs are everywhere; and when the hero tries to charm a girl he's met, they are Bowlly's words he reaches for.
It was when, years later, he was brooding over an idea for a further play about Bowlly and found he was really more interested in the songs than in the singer, Potter has said in an interview, that he began to hatch the work which has brought him a wider audience than anything else. Pennies from Heaven (1978), described as a play in 'Six Parts with Music', is in fact a serial to music, in a particular and quite novel sense of the words. Some sixty original recordings from the Bowlly era, including some by Bowlly himself, are woven into the story. Since Potter's hero, Arthur, is a sheet-music salesman of the period, this may seem perfectly natural, but the use to which Potter applies the songs is far from naturalistic. Without any hesitation or change of expression, characters step out of the play and into a rendition—I choose the word with care—of the number, miming to the original voice or voices and frequently adding a snappy little dance routine for good measure. Sometimes it is in enhancement of the mood of the scene, as in a Hollywood musical of the era, more often in ironic contrast to it. When, at the outset, Arthur's amorous advances are rebuffed by his pretty but cold and socially ambitious wife, he slips into 'The Clouds Will Soon Roll By'. Driving to Gloucester next morning, 'Prairie Moon' sets the optimistic mood of the journey and is also the song which he is carrying in his attaché case to push in the music shops along the way. Tracking down the pretty schoolteacher from the Forest of Dean (of course) who has taken his fancy, he croons 'Love Is the Sweetest Thing'. Sometimes a song is used more than once or used in opposite contexts by different parties. In one really surrealist instance the mysterious 'Accordian Man' whom Arthur also meets on the road leads a workhouse ensemble of sleeping tramps through 'Serenade in the Night'. The overall proposition is that, however false, rose-hued and saccharine the songs may be, the dreams they peddle are as necessary to human survival as the promises of religion used to be; indeed, they represent what heaven once represented to the devout, a truer and more enduring reality than the mundane ups and downs of the day. 'Songs', someone says, 'are the same as pictures. They drop into your head and 'elp you to understand things.'
This gives Potter his ending, widely but gratuitously thought to be Brechtian, whereby Arthur—sentenced to death for a murder he did not commit—is dematerialised from the execution shed to turn up 'like a bad penny' by his loved one's side on Hammersmith Bridge. 'The song is ended but the melody lingers on,' he says as the title song plays and the credits roll. It is, of course, an old-established dramatic get-out, used by John Gay in the original Beggar's Opera long before Brecht's version, by Jean Anouilh in L'Alouette and by Elliot Silverstein in the movie Cat Ballou. The author shifts into the Great Key and the players step away from the scaffold. Why not? My difficulties with the 1978 production, blurred at the time, sharper in retrospect, in fact had little to do with any of the conventions, though I must say the injection of the songs did lose its novelty over six weeks and an increasing proportion of them seemed to be there because it was time for another break or they were favourites of Potter's which he hadn't otherwise been able to place, and in either case were cued in a rather literal and certainly non-contrapuntal way—'Radio Times' for instance, by the happy accident of a railway traveller immersed in the Radio Times. But the real stumbling-block is that Potter's objective England of 1935 is not really any more substantial than the dream world of the songs. It is drawn not from life but from superficial associations with which the thirties are lumbered. It was a good decade for murder, so there are a couple of murders. Prostitution flourished. Tory M.P.s were corrupt hypocrites clinging to their military rank. Head waiters put jumped-up diners in their place. Buskers entertained the cinema queues. You get the feeling of time and place assembled from Great Western Railway posters, old Sunday papers and the novels of Patrick Hamilton.
The detective on Arthur's trail speaks in the accents of a floor-walker and coughs genteelly, ahem, behind his hand. His idea of justice is summed up in an exchange with Arthur's wife Joan, characteristic of Potter's humour but indicative, again, of this rather tuppence-coloured, derivative picture of a harsh bourgeois society. Arthur's best chance, the detective tells Joan, is to give himself up. 'What? And hang?'—'He'll have a fair trial first.' As for Arthur himself, he is—or was in Bob Hoskins's performance on television—an extraordinary mixture of a few period cockney features with the truculent whine and interrogative interjections ('Innit?', 'Aren't I?') of the Greater Londoners heard complaining on the radio any morning today.
The most prominent consequence of the original production was a revival of interest in the songs it pressed into service, with Dennis Potter's name written large in the advertisements for two Pennies from Heaven albums of 'Original recordings of 40 years ago by the most famous Bands and Vocalists of those Dizzy Dancing Years!' Though the show was subsequently bought for the cinema, with a screenplay by Potter transposing the action to Chicago, it seemed to me to belong absolutely to the whizzing traffic of television which Potter half enjoys and half regrets: something to hop on to and enjoy at the time, without too much brooding.
An apparent anomaly of the close Potter-Trodd partnership is that while Potter has, as recently as 1976, gone on record as preferring electronic drama to film, Kenith Trodd is a leading advocate of putting it all on to film and the compiler of the famous 'Trodd List' of the first three hundred British television dramas so to be made. His third production of a Potter script, the wry newspaper comedy Paper Roses (1971) for Granada, was filmed; so were Double Dare, at Ealing Studios, and the piece which followed it on the air a week or two later in 1976, Where Adam Stood. Potter took this from an episode in Edmund Gosse's Father and Son in which Gosse recalls the impact of Darwin's theory of evolution on his stern Victorian papa, a leading natural scientist but also—as a member of the Plymouth Brethren—a fundamentalist Christian committed to the literal truth of the Bible. His struggle to reconcile his beliefs with what he recognises to be irresistible scientific argument is played out against a small clash of wills with the boy Edmund as the two of them (the mother is dead) spend a holiday together in the West Country. It is on any estimation one of the half dozen best things Potter has done, and I would rate it as one of the two indisputable masterpieces: intellectually faultless, warm, tender and sly, with the boy unwittingly turning a prayer session intended to disabuse him of his desire for a model boat into a demonstration of the Darwinian principle of learning to adapt.
The director was Brian Gibson, who had moved across to drama from making scientific documentary films. In the summer of 1978, with Nat Crosby as cameraman, he shot the other outright masterpiece, Blue Remembered Hills (televised 1979), in which seven adult actors recreate the activities of seven seven-or-eight-year-olds on a summer's day in the middle of the Second World War; and for the first time it is quite impossible to consider the author's contribution apart from the director's. There is a scene, for instance, in which the craven Willie, having been subdued in a fight by the bully Pete, is getting his own back by means of a resourcefully improvised scare-story on the dangers of eating dirty apples ('They drop them on Germany, the R.A.F. do, so the Germans will eat them and die …'). As Pete, who has been eating a dirty apple, begins to half-believe him and lose his top-dog assurance, Gibson has Willie idly scuffing along a fallen tree-trunk so as to put himself first on a level with the other boy, then above him. Or when the two girls in the gang are pushing their battered old pram through the grass and it gets stuck, Gibson lets them struggle with it instead of going to a retake, and instinctively the plain, devoted one does all the work while the pretty one looks on.
The convention of the play works perfectly to throw into sharp relief the differentness of childhood—the lightning shifts of mood and loyalty, the fantasies, the schemes, the cruelty, the remorse. Childhood innocence, Potter is saying, is really unspoiled original sin. It is also the only convention he uses here: none of the other devices from the armoury—no cross-cutting, no time-jumps, no flashbacks, no inner visions, no pop tunes (instead, a jaunty little march by Marc Wilkinson). The unities are observed. You are reminded of a painter who has discarded the stylistic tricks which brought him fame in favour of simplicity of line.
Perhaps the permanence of film makes a television dramatist aim a little more consciously for immortality. On celluloid his handiwork is more accessible, more easily consulted, more readily distributed, more of a property. It is going to be seen again and again in years to come. Certainly Potter has bemoaned the destruction of his lost plays, and it is not unreasonable to find in Where Adam Stood and Blue Remembered Hills signs of someone who, after years of revelling in the hit-and-miss, hurrying traffic of television, is now ready to leave a few monuments. But to infer too much would be to misunderstand what makes Dennis run. His impulse is not to store up, it is to splash out. All that output, all that journalism on top—he is the last of the big spenders. After the débâcle of The Bonegrinder, Potter devoted his column in the Sun to his compulsion to be a writer. He knew he was destined either to be a laughable failure or a good writer—perhaps he dare not say 'a great writer'. He was interested in nothing between. All he knew was that he could only write by using himself, indeed using up himself. 'So when I die I want to be completely emptied and completely exhausted. Which means of course, that I am still rejoicing. Only a happy human being can write a sentence like that.'
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