by DAVID ROLINSON

“in keeping with the modernist sensibility and self-reflexivity of Hide and Seek and Only Make Believe, the decision to root a view of the past in the experiences and imagination of a writer protagonist, emphasises the fact that, far from being an objective assessment, any perspective on history can only ever be subjective” – John R. Cook.1


This one-day symposium, staged by Royal Holloway University of London on 10 December 2011, celebrated the 25th anniversary of The Singing Detective (1986).2 It paid tribute to the serial’s “narrative complexity, generic hybridity and formal experimentation” and placed writer Dennis Potter’s contribution alongside the contributions made by his collaborators, several of whom were present: producer Kenith Trodd, choreographer Quinny Sacks and actors Patrick Malahide and Bill Paterson.3 Other guests included Peter Bowker (as a modern television writer inspired by Potter), plus academic speakers and, mixing practitioner and academic perspectives, Professor Jonathan Powell, who was Head of Drama at the BBC when The Singing Detective was made. This mixture of academic and practitioner perspectives has been a welcome and often rewarding feature of British television drama conferences in recent years: see, for instance, the conference proceedings published as part of British Television Drama: Past, Present and Future.4

  1. John R. Cook, Dennis Potter: A Life on Screen (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), p. 217. Second edition. Play for Today: Only Make Believe, tx. BBC1, 12 February 1973. ↩

  2. The Singing Detective, tx. BBC1, 16 November 1986-21 December 1986. ↩

  3. Quotation from the conference blurb, which is still available, with the day’s running order, at http://ies.sas.ac.uk/events/conferences/2011/SingingDetective/ ↩

  4. Jonathan Bignell, Madeleine Macmurraugh-Kavanagh and Stephen Lacey (editors), British Television Drama: Past, Present and Future (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000). ↩

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by DAVID ROLINSON<\/h4>\n

\u201cin keeping with the modernist sensibility and self-reflexivity of Hide and Seek<\/em> and Only Make Believe<\/em>, the decision to root a view of the past in the experiences and imagination of a writer protagonist, emphasises the fact that, far from being an objective assessment, any perspective on history can only ever be subjective\u201d – John R. Cook.1<\/a><\/sup> <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>
\nThis one-day symposium, staged by Royal Holloway University of London on 10 December 2011, celebrated the 25th anniversary of The Singing Detective<\/em> (1986).2<\/a><\/sup> It paid tribute to the serial\u2019s \u201cnarrative complexity, generic hybridity and formal experimentation\u201d and placed writer Dennis Potter\u2019s contribution alongside the contributions made by his collaborators, several of whom were present: producer Kenith Trodd, choreographer Quinny Sacks and actors Patrick Malahide and Bill Paterson.3<\/a><\/sup> Other guests included Peter Bowker (as a modern television writer inspired by Potter), plus academic speakers and, mixing practitioner and academic perspectives, Professor Jonathan Powell, who was Head of Drama at the BBC when The Singing Detective<\/em> was made. This mixture of academic and practitioner perspectives has been a welcome and often rewarding feature of British television drama conferences in recent years: see, for instance, the conference proceedings published as part of British Television Drama: Past, Present and Future<\/em>.4<\/a><\/sup> <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

This piece is partly a report of the day\u2019s proceedings, and partly an essay responding to some of the ideas raised. In the interests of maintaining topicality, it was written in a bit of a rush and my writing here has some rough edges, but hopefully there are enough points of interests to compensate for the more clunkily-written and long-winded bits, and for my assumption that you already know a little about the series, its production and how it’s been studied.<\/p>\n

After introductions, and Trodd paying tribute to absent friends \u2013 those who were billed but unable to attend, plus Potter himself \u2013 the first main panel, \u2018The Creators: Innovation in Production\u2019, began with a clip of the serial\u2019s ending, the first of Trodd\u2019s carefully-programmed extracts. Trodd\u2019s opening address combined a return to his earlier paper \u2018Whose Dennis Is It Anyway?\u20195<\/a><\/sup> with new asides, including his verdict on Emergency Ward 9<\/em>, a Thirty Minute Theatre<\/em> play written by Potter and story-edited by Trodd, which had been recently rediscovered.6<\/a><\/sup> Mindful of the fact that this was to be screened the next day at the National Film Theatre as part of Missing Believed Wiped 2011, Trodd resisted spoilers but indicated his \u201cshock\u201d at some of its content (racial attitudes which, as he indicated, were presented but left to the audience to negotiate), noting that he had not got this from the printed word, an interesting observation given the difficulties that scholars face in reconstructing missing drama from scripts, documents, audios and other materials.7<\/a><\/sup> I was at the Missing Believed Wiped screening the next day, where Trodd introduced Emergency Ward 9<\/em>, and indeed it does warrant re-examination by critics over and above what has been done with the written text: as Trodd testified, his recurring anecdote about an actor protractedly messing up a scene was not reflected in the content. For the many Doctor Who<\/em> fans in the Missing Believed Wiped audience, the two rediscovered Doctor Who<\/em> episodes had comparable moments \u2013 but I\u2019ve written about those episodes, and forms of memory, in the new issue of fanzine Panic Moon<\/em>, so will say no more here.8<\/a><\/sup> The screening of Emergency Ward 9<\/em> was well-received by the Missing Believed Wiped audience, and was a perfectly-timed rediscovery, given that several elements from it were reworked by Potter in The Singing Detective<\/em>.9<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
\nTrodd\u2019s introduction established some useful contexts, even if this necessarily meant covering familiar ground for Potter scholars. He discussed his professional experience with Potter \u2013 that famously combustible writer-producer relationship \u2013 and critiqued Potter\u2019s post-Singing Detective<\/em> work on the grounds that Potter had become \u201cconfused by the spell of his own eminence\u201d and had stopped listening, resulting in a hollowing-out exemplified by the problematic Potter-directed Blackeyes<\/em>.10<\/a><\/sup> Of course, this came after his falling-out with Trodd. Trodd was not writing off Potter\u2019s later career \u2013 at other points during the day he was keen to advance the case for Karaoke<\/em> and Cold Lazarus<\/em> – but attesting to the power of The Singing Detective<\/em>.11<\/a><\/sup> This power also troubled Potter, whom Trodd described as being unable to speak after Trodd screened an emotionally overpowering extract from The Singing Detective<\/em>. Filling in details on their place within the BBC, Trodd noted the irony that they felt like guerrillas fighting within what is now seen as a golden age. <\/p>\n

Trodd\u2019s amusing description of Potter\u2019s \u201cannoying\u201d claim to not be writing autobiography but using the form of autobiography was also worth making, setting up some of the academic content later in the day. Although not developed in this talk, this point is central to the interplay of memory and authorship, subjectivity, Creation and creation in the serial. Again not discussed on the day, biographical-auteurist approaches reward but also imprison critics and viewers of The Singing Detective<\/em>. As John R. Cook noted in his superb book on Potter, Mary Whitehouse\u2019s assumption that Potter must by a dirty sex-obsessed writer because he<\/em>, like Marlow, must have caught his mother up to no good, led to legal consequences.12<\/a><\/sup> We could add Potter\u2019s description of autobiography as \u201cthe most boot-lickingly brutish of all the literary arts, especially when it purports to wrestle with personal motive [\u2026] an inherently dishonest category of mislabelled fiction\u201d.13<\/a><\/sup> But he knew that, as he told Melvyn Bragg, \u201cWhen the novelist says \u2018I\u2019 you know he doesn\u2019t mean \u2018I\u2019, and yet you want him to mean \u2018I\u2019\u201d.14<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

Questions of writer-centred analysis have already been problematised, in the studies by Joost Hunningher and others of Potter\u2019s unprecedently close collaboration with director Jon Amiel,15<\/a><\/sup> and the symposium\u2019s next guest, Quinny Sacks, raised intriguing extra layers to the idea of authorial voice in the serial. Inevitably, the legendary Dem Dry Bones sequence served as introduction.
\n