by DAVID ROLINSON

BTVD_Potter_FTYBR_1

Dennis Potter’s non-fiction writing is a tremendous body of work – reviews, radio talks and newspaper features on television, radio, books, society, politics and more.¹ I was going to just run through some of his television reviews, but Potter wouldn’t let me get off that lightly. His non-fiction work interweaves with his fiction work in characteristically multi-layered, provocative and entertaining ways. He never lets us forget that words matter. So the word “reviewing” becomes unreliable, which is annoying if you’ve put it in your title. He’s not just a writer who wrote some reviews – his writing reviews, and re-views, his own plays and much more besides. There are lots of traps to fall into, as we can tell from the start of Follow the Yellow Brick Road…

This essay is an earlier – longer – draft version of a talk I gave at the Dennis Potter Day held at Dean Heritage Centre, Soudley, Forest of Dean on 29 June 2013. The full schedule of the day’s events can be found here. Some of this essay has been rewritten for reading rather than speaking, but most of the new or unused material is restricted to these endnotes. Detailed coverage of the event will appear on the Potter Matters blog, which we will link to when the event’s coverage is uploaded. ↩

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by DAVID ROLINSON<\/h4>\n
$\"BTVD_Potter_FTYBR_1\"$ <\/p>\n
Dennis Potter\u2019s non-fiction writing is a tremendous body of work \u2013 reviews, radio talks and newspaper features on television, radio, books, society, politics and more.^{1<\/a><\/sup> I was going to just run through some of his television reviews, but Potter wouldn\u2019t let me get off that lightly. His non-fiction work interweaves with his fiction work in characteristically multi-layered, provocative and entertaining ways. He never lets us forget that words matter<\/em>. So the word “reviewing” becomes unreliable, which is annoying if you\u2019ve put it in your title. He\u2019s not just a writer who wrote some reviews \u2013 his writing reviews, and re-views, his own plays and much more besides. There are lots of traps to fall into, as we can tell from the start of Follow the Yellow Brick Road<\/em>\u2026<\/p>\n}

\n<\/iframe> \n[Extract: 1:38 to 4.25]<\/em><\/p>\nJack Black sits and comments on drama, including its content and style \u2013 it\u2019s tempting to use Jack to introduce Potter the TV reviewer, sitting in Ross arguing with London drama,<a href=\"#fn2-3817\" title=\"Heritage and “mediating memory” were vital and fascinating concepts in papers delivered by Joanne Garde-Hansen, Hannah Grist and Laura Earley. My comment here ties in with ideas of a “Forest of Dean Potter” and a “London Potter” raised in particular after the acquisition of Potter’s archive by the Dean Heritage Centre in the Forest of Dean, and subsequently tackled in Garde-Hansen’s paper. The “heritage” question related to how his work and archive can live on through exhibitions, archive access and activities. The screening at the event of the Rural Media Company’s film Buried Heart<\/em>, a piece “inspired” by Blue Remembered Hills<\/em> and featuring young people from the Forest of Dean, was one example of exciting possible outputs. Given that the audience consisted mostly of locals, with few visiting academics, the question of heritage was even more live. The site also includes a Dennis Potter audio trail, with family interviews accessible in places like a period classroom evocative of the ones in Stand Up Nigel Barton<\/em> and The Singing Detective<\/em>. The Potter audio trail doesn’t involve walking round in your pants listening to Potter’s voiceover from Blackeyes<\/em>.\" rel=\"footnote\">2<\/a><\/sup> though I\u2019d have to have my tongue in my cheek since Jack uses a string of clich\u00e9s: wondering when something\u2019s going to happen before viewers “switch over or switch off”; later he says these are dirty, sex-obsessed plays by people who go to Trotskyite parties and sleep around. As always, although there are biographical resonances to this,<a href=\"#fn3-3817\" title=\"Potter’s biographer, Humphrey Carpenter, can tell you which parties and people this might refer to. More to the point, Potter wrote in his non-fiction work about his disillusionment with attending Left gatherings of this sort.\" rel=\"footnote\">3<\/a><\/sup> Potter is playing with seeming<\/em> autobiography and<\/em> his own previous work: Jack\u2019s visit to a psychiatrist resembles scenes from Moonlight on the Highway<\/em> and Hide and Seek<\/em>;<a href=\"#fn4-3817\" title=\"Fortunately, in the first paper presented on the day, John Cook screened the opening of Moonlight on the Highway<\/em>.\" rel=\"footnote\">4<\/a><\/sup> as does Jack\u2019s trauma about looking for God and finding nothing but “Filth” and “slime”, though Potter in the published play says “I am afraid to concede that the excess of disgust jerking out from Jack Black\u2019s mouth more closely represented what I felt about the cold and faithless world, and its suffocating materiality, or my cold and faithless self”. Jack says “I don\u2019t want to be in this play”.<a href=\"#fn5-3817\" title=\"Dennis Potter, \u2018Some Sort of Preface\u2019, Waiting for the Boat, p. 20.\" rel=\"footnote\">5<\/a><\/sup> His comments about bad dialogue remind us of Hide and Seek<\/em> and the later Karaoke<\/em> \u2013 the need to write your own lines in life \u2013 and our place under an Author-hyphen-God that John Cook traced throughout Potter\u2019s work (one of Jack\u2019s first lines here is “God Almighty”). Whether Jack\u2019s being watched by God or the naturalistic gaze of the cameras, how can he create or re-create himself, we wonder as we see him view and re-view the adverts for Krispy Krunch and Waggy-Tail Din-Din in his subjective memory?<\/p>\n<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.britishtelevisiondrama.org.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/07\/BTVD_Potter_FTYBR_2-e1375283420607.png\" alt=\"BTVD_Potter_FTYBR_2\" width=\"250\" height=\"188\" class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-3832\" \/><\/p>\nSo how can he create his reality? Previewing Blue Remembered Hills<\/em> in 1979, Potter said: “The most beautiful part of being alive is our capacity to shape our lives by language, by stories. The world is full of the murmur of human beings trying to reshape reality.”<a href=\"#fn6-3817\" title=\"Potter, in Lesley Thornton, ‘Innocence and Experience’, Radio Times<\/em>, 27 January – 2 February 1979, p. 9.\" rel=\"footnote\">6<\/a><\/sup> Writing, rewriting and revision are vital to The Singing Detective<\/em>. John Caughie observed the importance of “writing and reading”, as Philip Marlow “tries and fails to use art to sublimate pain and order a disordered reality”.<a href=\"#fn7-3817\" title=\"John Caughie, Television Drama: Realism, Modernism and British Culture<\/em> (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 173-174.\" rel=\"footnote\">7<\/a><\/sup> Rewriting his fictional stories in his head,<a href=\"#fn8-3817\" title=\"“the Forties thriller which Marlow is “writing” (or rewriting) in his mind” – Carpenter, pp. 439-440.\" rel=\"footnote\">8<\/a><\/sup> Marlow is also rewriting himself, as Antony Hilfer observes: “the distinction between replaying and revising becomes crucial, as story-revision becomes self-revision”.<a href=\"#fn9-3817\" title=\"Antony Hilfer, \u2018Run Over by One\u2019s Own Story: Genre and Ethos in Dennis Potter\u2019s The Singing Detective<\/em>\u2019, in Jonathan Bignell, Stephen Lacey, Madeleine Macmurraugh-Kavanagh (editors), British Television Drama: Past, Present and Future<\/em> (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000), pp. 133-134. Marlow is \u201ca character run over by his own story\u201d.\" rel=\"footnote\">9<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\nPotter<\/em>, too, is rewriting earlier stories: The Singing Detective<\/em> uses bits of Stand Up Nigel Barton<\/em>, Emergency Ward 9<\/em>, the unpublished Country Boy<\/em><a href=\"#fn10-3817\" title=\"I haven’t read Country Boy<\/em>, so here I am indebted to John Cook’s analysis of it.\" rel=\"footnote\">10<\/a><\/sup> and non-fiction including Between Two Rivers<\/em>, The Glittering Coffin<\/em> and newspaper columns, plus Hide and Seek<\/em> (of course, when Gibbon tries to psychoanalyse Marlow by reading a sticky bit of Marlow\u2019s book, the words are from Potter\u2019s novel Hide and Seek<\/em>). The Singing Detective<\/em> and Stand Up Nigel Barton<\/em> are linked by classroom scenes in which a boy is wrongly blamed for the lead character\u2019s childhood crime of either stealing a daffodil or shitting on a desk.<a href=\"#fn11-3817\" title=\"For more on the ideas covered in this paragraph, see <a href="http:\/\/www.britishtelevisiondrama.org.uk\/?p=2164" target="_self" rel="noopener">my piece on The Singing Detective<\/em><\/a>. Appropriately enough given that I’m talking here about writerly revision, I have an edited, rewritten form of that Singing Detective<\/em> piece forthcoming in the Journal of Screenwriting<\/em>, Volume 4, Number 3, 2013.\" rel=\"footnote\">11<\/a><\/sup> But between these two pieces came \u2018Telling Stories\u2019, a Potter article for New Society<\/em> in 1975. In a talk about the Forest of Dean, Potter mentioned the real-life incident that inspired the scene, and found out what happened to the real boy. How do we use this? It would be tricky to use it as autobiographical “proof” \u2013<a href=\"#fn12-3817\" title=\"Given that I’ve quoted Potter’s views on biography in other pieces, here’s a more playful quotation, from his positive review of the book From Newgate to Dannemora: the Rise of the Penitentiary in New York<\/em>: “Biographies may, it is true, make great play of the fact that a man had piles or caught the 3.14 train on a sunny afternoon in mid-April. Such accumulation of tiny detail, such alleged Insight, seems to have become a characteristic of so-called quality journalism, and the rot has also infected all sorts of biographical studies. Too often we get a heap of pointless detail decorated with a scurfy impertinence, the kind of pseudo-academic opportunism typical of a time where you may find your tutor on the Eamon <\/em> [sic] Andrews Show<\/em>” – ‘The battle of the penologists’, New Society<\/em>, 19 August 1965, p. 27.\" rel=\"footnote\">12<\/a><\/sup> Potter uses the codes of autobiography as a dramatic tool; as he said, “When the novelist says ‘I’ you know he doesn\u2019t mean ‘I’, and yet you want him to mean ‘I’.”<a href=\"#fn13-3817\" title=\"‘An Interview with Dennis Potter\u2019, Without Walls<\/em>, tx. Channel 4, 5 April 1994.\" rel=\"footnote\">13<\/a><\/sup> \u2018Telling Stories\u2019 is a fascinating article in its own right about what Potter calls “the relationship between fiction and lying”.<a href=\"#fn14-3817\" title=\"Dennis Potter, \u2018Telling Stories\u2019, New Society<\/em>, 15 May 1975, p. 419.\" rel=\"footnote\">14<\/a><\/sup> Potter doesn\u2019t say whether the boy\u2019s fate is true or a lie because “it\u2019s a truth either way”.<a href=\"#fn15-3817\" title=\"Potter, \u2018Telling Stories\u2019, p. 420. Potter’s childhood, and concerns with rewriting memory, also feature elsewhere, such as in a piece about Sankey’s Sacred Songs and Solos<\/em> – Potter, ‘Marching to Zion’, New Society<\/em>, 19 June 1975, p. 723.\" rel=\"footnote\">15<\/a><\/sup> Over the years, in reviews, journalism and interviews, Potter not only worked through key themes but also made his persona an intertext, just as he said that he survived his illness through the power of “the contest between my real self and my invented self”.<a href=\"#fn16-3817\" title=\"Dennis Potter, in Graham Fuller, Potter on Potter<\/em> (London: Faber and Faber, 1993), p. 10.\" rel=\"footnote\">16<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\nIn The Singing Detective<\/em> we find “an essentially subjective capacity, a cinema of the mind, by which the subject replays scenes of his subjective formation and past”.<a href=\"#fn17-3817\" title=\"John Bowen, \u2018David Copperfield\u2019s home movies\u2019, in John Glavin (editor), Dickens on Screen<\/em> (2003), p. 30.\" rel=\"footnote\">17<\/a><\/sup> Except, this is John Bowen\u2019s description of David Copperfield<\/em>. <\/p>\n<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.britishtelevisiondrama.org.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/07\/BTVD_Wave_TSD-e1375283343226.png\" alt=\"BTVD_Wave_TSD\" width=\"250\" height=\"188\" class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-3828\" \/> \n<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.britishtelevisiondrama.org.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/07\/BTVD_Wave_DC-e1375283310467.png\" alt=\"BTVD_Wave_DC\" width=\"250\" height=\"141\" class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-3827\" \/><\/p>\nThere’s no room here to develop a full comparison between Potter and Charles Dickens.<a href=\"#fn18-3817\" title=\"Dickens scholars may be interested in Opium Blue<\/em> – Potter’s unmade adaptation\/completion of The Mystery of Edwin Drood<\/em> – or his suggestion of a drama about Dickens meeting Hans Christian Andersen, though that was apparently quite a sketchy idea as part of the pitch for a production deal with London Weekend Television and was not developed. (In both of those cases, I am again indebted to John Cook for his references to those pieces.) Potter’s book reviews included The Wild Swan<\/em>, Monica Stirling’s biography of Andersen: “Nostalgia of the most misleading kind mingles with our memories of stories heard in childhood.” – Potter, ‘Childhood bites man’, New Society<\/em>, 25 November 1965, pp. 30-31. Dickens’s Thomas Gradgrind features in his review of the book English versus Examinations<\/em>: ‘Even Gradgrind had a point’, New Society<\/em>, 30 September 1965, p. 27.\" rel=\"footnote\">18<\/a><\/sup> However, one quick point can help to explain the idea of Potter as a “reviewing writer”. Several gestures are repeated in The Singing Detective<\/em>, including characters waving,<a href=\"#fn19-3817\" title=\"As Catrin Prys put it, the interconnections within memories that “build” into an “insight into […] self-knowledge” – Prys, p. 132.\" rel=\"footnote\">19<\/a><\/sup> which we see as originating from young Philip\u2019s departure on the train. We see it partly from Philip\u2019s perspective, moving away from his father. Similarly in David Copperfield<\/em>, the moment in which David\u2019s mother held up her baby while he left in the carrier’s cart – “I was in the carrier\u2019s cart when I heard her calling to me. I looked out, and she stood at the garden-gate alone, holding her baby up in her arms for me to see. [\u2026] So I lost her.” – is subject to repetition: Dickens repeats the phrase “holding up” during the description and David remembers the moment. The sense of loss, and of moving away from childhood, is underlined in this 1999 TV version, in which we take David\u2019s point of view and move away. These two stories have obvious things in common, each featuring a writer looking back, with a sense of author-character and author playing with modes of autobiography, but there are similarities that could be explored further.<a href=\"#fn20-3817\" title=\"I’m not talking about influence here, but correlations between the two texts through which each sheds light on the other. David Copperfield<\/em> also contains a form of primal scene, and the sense of sexuality being – in John Carey’s phrase – “driven underground”. Bowen writes about “the extraordinary and disruptive power of memory”, and how “Memory is vision before it is anything else”, and goes deeper to consider the extent to which this vision is, via Laura Mulvey, male-centred.\" rel=\"footnote\">20<\/a><\/sup> For now, sticking to my central idea, Bowen describes moments across Dickens\u2019 work “when a character is able to witness, with hallucinatory clarity, a scene from his or her past, and yet is unable to participate in it or change anything” \u2013 and that shares a dynamic with Potter. As Potter put it in Hide and Seek<\/em>: “hypnogogic images, the strangely potent montages which come at a mind already lapsed into a sort of sleep.”<a href=\"#fn21-3817\" title=\"Dennis Potter, Hide and Seek<\/em>, p. 77.\" rel=\"footnote\">21<\/a><\/sup> But Marlow, like Potter, can review as well as re-view. So Potter\u2019s a reviewing writer,<a href=\"#fn22-3817\" title=\"This idea could be developed much further. Reading Gavin Lambert’s 1975 study of crime literature, The Dangerous Edge<\/em>, it seemed to me that Potter’s appropriation of genre went beyond the iconography, plotting and surface world inhabited by Marlow and instead grasped the layered dark side of writers like Eric Ambler. Not only does Ambler use a character called Marlow and a character (Charles Latimer) who writes detective stories – not that this displaces the importance of Raymond Chandler’s Marlowe to The Singing Detective<\/em> – but Ambler is aware of the face as “a screen to hide [his character’s] nakedness”, with links to Jung and the idea of persona. There is the psychoanalytic sense of impulses beneath the surface, the ape beneath the velvet, and a need to clean the (inside of the) body. Lambert’s discussion of Graham Greene is also relevant, not just because of The Third Man<\/em>‘s importance to the style of the noir sections of The Singing Detective<\/em>, but because Lambert discusses another Philip who experiences a primal scene and is dragged into adult lies in ‘The Basement Room’, which became the film The Fallen Idol<\/em>; scenes in which death and birth are paralleled; and a moment when a character “shot his own unbearable world”, which is one way of reading key scenes in Potter’s serial. Gavin Lambert, The Dangerous Edge<\/em> (New York: Grossman, 1975), pp. 119, 123, 128, 133, 145-146. See also the discussion of dreams, p. 156. Again, influence is not the key issue here, or else it would be time for a shot-by-shot comparison of The Singing Detective<\/em> with key sequences in Nicolas Roeg’s Bad Timing<\/em>.\" rel=\"footnote\">22<\/a><\/sup> but he\u2019s also\u2026<\/p>\n\u2026a writing reviewer. What do we do<\/em> with Potter\u2019s reviews? In his article \u2018Dennis\u2019s Other Hat\u2019, Philip Purser said “It is only natural to wonder to what extent this critical function informed his creative process and vice versa. How many of the familiar obsessions of the plays can be first discerned in the reviews? Does he draw on his experience of writing for television to write about television?”<a href=\"#fn23-3817\" title=\"Philip Purser, \u2018Dennis\u2019s Other Hat\u2019, in Vernon W. Gras and John R. Cook (editors), The Passion of Dennis Potter: International Collected Essays<\/em> (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), p. 179. Certainly studies of Potter have made intelligent selections from across his non-fiction work to illustrate selected features, such as the Hoggartian studies of everyday social habits in his early columns through to direct comments on his plays. He does sometimes reflect on his plays in different contexts – for instance, when reviewing Forgotten Love Songs<\/em>, he talks about “botching Casanova<\/em>“.\" rel=\"footnote\">23<\/a><\/sup> Purser gives insights into the job of TV reviewing, and his questions here help dig into themes in the plays and Potter\u2019s views on issues such as the use of studio, debates on non-naturalistic form, changes in television practices and policies (which could be developed), and attempts at autobiography. But Potter\u2019s non-fiction needs more attention as<\/em> non-fiction. We could see this work as an example of current concepts in Television Studies, as “transmedia” texts or as “paratexts” (material circulating around a text, like continuity announcements and trailers). The challenge is to see Potter\u2019s non-fiction work in these areas as part of his body of work.<a href=\"#fn24-3817\" title=\"This is a pretty thin point, suggesting an auteurist-textual reading that was slightly out of keeping with the rest of the day, which suggested refreshing, exciting new developments for Potter studies in line with new developments in the field.\" rel=\"footnote\">24<\/a><\/sup> Yes, it helps our analysis of The Singing Detective<\/em> to know the \u2018Telling Stories\u2019 article which almost pops into the mouths of Marlow and Gibbon at a crucial moment, but it\u2019s also part of the layers of quote-unquote-biography in its own right and as part of Potter\u2019s construction of himself as publicly-known writer. Potter\u2019s projection of self isn\u2019t just publicity, it\u2019s part of the impact of the fiction \u2013 the wanting “I” to be “I”.<\/p>\n<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.britishtelevisiondrama.org.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/07\/BTVD_Potter_Penda-e1375283295682.jpg\" alt=\"BTVD_Potter_Penda\" width=\"250\" height=\"188\" class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-3826\" \/> \nStudies of Potter have barely scratched the surface of Potter’s non-fiction writing, using it in the sort of selective way that I’m about to do myself. I\u2019ll just pick three television reviews that haven’t yet been explored in Potter studies. Giving a glowing review to the fabulous Penda\u2019s Fen<\/em>, written by David Rudkin and directed by Alan Clarke, Potter engaged with its themes, with a boy in \u2018a patch of landscape and so of mindscape\u2019: “The place where we grow up, where we learn to speak and then not to speak, is always beyond the reach of the cartographer and forever charged with the intensity of those first perceptions which turn words or songs heard in the head into particular configurations of local topography”.<a href=\"#fn25-3817\" title=\"Dennis Potter, \u2018Boy in a Landscape\u2019, New Statesman<\/em>, 29 March, p. 459.\" rel=\"footnote\">25<\/a><\/sup> If we take Purser’s suggested methods then we might suspect that Penda\u2019s Fen<\/em> helped inform Blue Remembered Hills<\/em>, were it not for the familiarity of the phrasing. In Hide and Seek<\/em> the previous year, Potter had written, “No cartographer can trace on any known map the place where we were born and bred. Unlocatable is that lost land where we first hear someone calling our name. Gone is the place where we learn to speak and read and laugh and cry (or, worse, not cry), gone like trees walking.”<a href=\"#fn26-3817\" title=\"Potter, Hide and Seek<\/em>, p. 20.\" rel=\"footnote\">26<\/a><\/sup> Again, my point here isn’t to just note imagery and themes in Penda’s Fen<\/em> that would be interesting to compare with Potter’s fiction and non-fiction,<a href=\"#fn27-3817\" title=\"Having said that… Follow the Yellow Brick Road<\/em> and non-fiction pieces describe an incident involving Potter on a bike with God being “too near” that resembles a scene with a demon in Penda’s Fen<\/em>, though that operates in the fusion of religion, politics, sexuality and Elgar circulating at that stage of the play, and leads to a devastating seemingly hallucinatory ritual sequence.\" rel=\"footnote\">27<\/a><\/sup> because it’s the dialogue between texts that interests me, whether you call it recycling, drawing correlations or re-viewing.<\/p>\nDavid Rudkin, John Hopkins and others remind us that Potter was not unique carving out an individual career and personal themes and styles in that television structure \u2013 but paradoxically, recognising this, and Potter\u2019s interaction with them in reviews, helps us to see what is distinctively Potter. Yes, Potter\u2019s engagement with developments in TV helps us study those developments, including the shift to more director-led drama and the phasing out of Play for Today<\/em>, which \u2013 along with documentaries and late-night arts programmes \u2013 he said, with a lovely turn of phrase, were “the major area left on TV still capable of transmitting the nourishing zest of an individual imagination which necessarily cares not a controller\u2019s fart for ratings charts or conveyor-belt packaging.”<a href=\"#fn28-3817\" title=\"Potter, \u2018Boy in a Landscape\u2019, New Statesman<\/em>, 29 March, p. 459.\" rel=\"footnote\">28<\/a><\/sup> He had fun with the BBC, of course. He praised Roy Minton and Alan Clarke\u2019s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.britishtelevisiondrama.org.uk\/?p=3570\" target=\"_self\" rel=\"noopener\">Funny Farm<\/em><\/a> for “catching the pace and moods of any institution for the unwell, such as a crowded ward, an army billet or the Television Centre [\u2026] The patients didn\u2019t seem to watch much television, another disturbing similarity to the inmates whose doors open onto a long corridor that goes round and round the Television Centre and never quite makes it out into the real world.”<a href=\"#fn29-3817\" title=\"Dennis Potter, \u2018Switch Back\u2019, New Statesman<\/em>, 7 March 1975, p. 319. He again uses “the funny farm” in relation to television in his review of Clive James’s Visions Before Midnight<\/em> – see later endnote for reference.\" rel=\"footnote\">29<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\nPurser brings out some interesting moments of Potter holding surprising, even contradictory, opinions in relation to what others are doing in TV. We could add others. Potter\u2019s review of the last episode of Philip Martin\u2019s Gangsters<\/em> described the series as “so obnoxiously delighted with its own gaggle of second-hand styles that it seemed to be licking itself all over”.<a href=\"#fn30-3817\" title=\"Dennis Potter, \u2018The great BBC balancing act\u2019, Sunday Times<\/em>, 19 February 1978.\" rel=\"footnote\">30<\/a><\/sup> To be fair, his main problem is the racial violence in the series, but it\u2019s a surprising dismissal of this episode, which writes out its lead character in a provocatively non-naturalistic way,<a href=\"#fn31-3817\" title=\"Relegated to an endnote in concern about giving a spoiler to a 35-year-old series: the programme’s writer appears as a hitman in the guise of a version of WC Fields and kills the previously indestructible lead character with a single touch of his hand.\" rel=\"footnote\">31<\/a><\/sup> and in which a character walks off-set, ending a crime series with a non-naturalistic device even more provocative than the ending of Follow the Yellow Brick Road<\/em>, when the camera seems to confirm Jack\u2019s fear that he\u2019s in a television play. When Lindsay Anderson later showed the studio in The Old Crowd<\/em>,<a href=\"#fn32-3817\" title=\"Though it was made on 21 and 22 February 1978. John Izod, Karl Magee, Kathryn Hannan and Isabelle Gourdin-Sangouard, Lindsay Anderson: Cinema Authorship<\/em> (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012), p. 191. Subsequently referred to as Izod et al, Lindsay Anderson<\/em>.\" rel=\"footnote\">32<\/a><\/sup> he was criticised by reviewers whom he felt were not able to deal with his innovative approach,<a href=\"#fn33-3817\" title=\"Anderson found it “disappointing that critics who spend so much of their time bemoaning the lack of experiment and innovation on television should rush so enthusiastically to club to death a piece which, at the very least, showed a great deal of innovative daring.” Lindsay Anderson, letter to Michael Grade, 18 July 1979, quoted in Izod et al, p. 198. Perhaps my subsequent description of Anderson’s “Brechtian” approach is less accurate a description than satirical, surreal and like Bunuel – ibid, p. 199.\" rel=\"footnote\">33<\/a><\/sup> seemingly unaware of television’s many attempts at Brechtian experimentation: indeed, Julian Barnes criticised the “stale old device [\u2026] of including shots of the camera and the director\u2019s gallery”.<a href=\"#fn34-3817\" title=\"Julian Barnes, ‘Land of Lost Content’, New Statesman<\/em>, 2 February 1979, p. 159. Quoted in Izod et al, p. 196.\" rel=\"footnote\">34<\/a><\/sup> Anderson expected flak from television critics because they disparaged the medium even more than he did.<a href=\"#fn35-3817\" title=\"“Anderson had no high regard for television reviewers in the press, most of whom seemed to him to have an extraordinary disregard of the work they commented on.” Izod et al, p. 195. Izod et al, drawing on Erik Hedling’s work, place hostility to Anderson in the context of standards of television reviewing. This is well done, and readers of Lindsay Anderson<\/em> might want to update it with reference to <a href="http:\/\/jumpingbeanbag.com\/derision-before-midnight\/" target="_self" rel="noopener">Phil Norman’s excellent post on television reviewers here<\/a>, although I don’t necessarily agree with the specifics of every Old Crowd<\/em> review that Lindsay Anderson<\/em> gives as evidence. Clive James’s review of The Old Crowd<\/em> draws the response that Clive James ‘showcased himself’ rather than write on his topic. Potter’s review of James’s Visions Before Midnight<\/em> describes his Observer<\/em> reviews as “stunning” and finds “extremely moving” James’s statement that “Television is for everybody. It follows that a television critic, at his best, is everybody too – he must enjoy diversity without being eclectic and stay receptive without being gulled.” We might playfully consider the response of Anderson – previously a film critic – to Potter’s statement that “Those who get bitten by a critic’s vulpine fangs almost always cry out, in the agony of their little death, for the salve of “constructive criticism” with which to bind up their torn flesh. James rightly dismisses this standard ploy as ‘the eternal plea of the kitsch-merchant’.” Dennis Potter, ‘Glop’, 22 April 1977, p. 535. Given that Anderson once called James “the thinking man’s Rolf Harris”, we can only speculate – Anderson, letter to Jeremy Isaacs, 18 July 1979, quoted in Izod et al, n91, p. 205. If Anderson was more aware of television drama than he indicated in interviews, he may have shared Potter’s concern (in relation to Gangsters<\/em>) with types and effectivity of non-naturalistic forms – the “quality of response” I talk about in the next paragraph.\" rel=\"footnote\">35<\/a><\/sup> But Potter was not that sort of critic.<\/p>\nAs programme maker and critic Potter was of course involved in a debate, as John Cook noted, about “the choices between ‘naturalism’ and its alternatives”: “not simply a question of which dramatic style to use but between two fundamentally different ways of seeing.”<a href=\"#fn36-3817\" title=\"John Cook, Dennis Potter: A Life on Screen<\/em> Second Edition (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), p. 144.\" rel=\"footnote\">36<\/a><\/sup> Introducing the Follow the Yellow Brick Road<\/em> script, Potter talked about “the quality of response.” Just as Jack Black talked about the timeslot of the play he\u2019s in, Potter was interested in how programmes exist in schedules: “Bullets on one side and football on the other… the life of a play so doubly boxed can be sucked away in the surrounding flow. Worse, a panel game, a plastic-prairied Western, a hard-eyed news bulletin, Wimbledon, a detective melodrama and an original play eventually submerge together into the same kind of experience” in what he called a “landscape of indifference”.<a href=\"#fn37-3817\" title=\"Potter, introduction to script, p. 148. Or, as he put it elsewhere, a Robin Day and pinging spittoon choice.\" rel=\"footnote\">37<\/a><\/sup> When Potter thought that The Singing Detective<\/em> hospital scenes should be shot in the TV studio, he, like Ken Loach and Tony Garnett,<a href=\"#fn38-3817\" title=\"Loach noted that “we were following the news so we tried to work in the style of World in Action [\u2026] so that people didn’t think ‘we’ve had the facts and now we will have the fiction’ but rather ‘we’ve had the facts \u2013 now here\u2019s some more facts with a different point of view'” – John Hill, \u2018Finding a form: politics and aesthetics in Fatherland<\/em>, Hidden Agenda<\/em> and Riff-Raff<\/em>\u2019, in George McKnight (ed), Agent of Challenge and Defiance<\/em>, Trowbridge: Flicks Books, p. 160). If “texts do their work in contexts”, drama-documentary “occupied a progressive role” not only because it “introduced into the discourses of television a repressed political, social discourse”, but because it might in turn shape the audience\u2019s “scepticism of the other representations which television offers” – John Caughie, ‘Progressive Television and Documentary Drama’, Screen<\/em>, Volume 21, Number 3, pp. 33-34. There’s more on this in Dave Rolinson, \u2018Small Screens and Big Voices: Televisual Social Realism and the Popular\u2019, in David Tucker (ed), British Social Realism in the Arts since 1940<\/em> (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).\" rel=\"footnote\">38<\/a><\/sup> saw how dramas could use their place in the schedule to invite reflection on how other forms (like news) work. Potter \u2013 like Gangsters<\/em>, ironically \u2013 blended and confronted genres, from advertising to Westerns to soap.<a href=\"#fn39-3817\" title=\"Certainly there\u2019s something about the transitions between songs and “reality” in Pennies from Heaven<\/em> that is jolting above and beyond the usual reference points of “non-naturalism”. There are interesting reasons and possible effects of Potter wanting to do the hospital scenes in The Singing Detective<\/em> in studio on video, in the context of what others in the industry were saying about, and doing with, studio at that time. Potter talked about wanting those scenes in the studio because he wanted them in what was still the dominant language of television naturalism, the language with which audiences were familiar.\" rel=\"footnote\">39<\/a><\/sup> His reviews show an awareness of texts in the context of the everyday, in schedules, with the ephemera of broadcasting, and how people watch television.<a href=\"#fn40-3817\" title=\"Jason Griffiths’ paper on the day included audio recordings of Potter’s family at home in the 1960s, a lovely underlining of the need to engage with the everyday. The day showed that Potter can be just as much a part of new methods of television scholarship as he was of the old ones. Indeed, if the first part of the day seemed to be likely to include textual analysis from experienced Potter scholars, speakers like Glen Creeber were keen to place their analysis in relation to their personal responses and experiences as viewers (seamlessly slotting in alongside John Belcher’s hugely entertaining talk on growing up in the Forest in the 1950s, a last-minute replacement paper that I think actually ended up being pretty much central to the day). This is just one of the ways in which the presence of locals improved the event, as well as making for such a lovely, friendly day. The presence of brass band and other music wafting into the marquee from a 1950s nostalgia event held the same day only added to this sense of heritage; as speakers commented, it was ‘Potteresque’.\" rel=\"footnote\">40<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.britishtelevisiondrama.org.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/07\/BTVD_Potter_FTYBR_4-e1375283368454.png\" alt=\"BTVD_Potter_FTYBR_4\" width=\"250\" height=\"188\" class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-3829\" \/> \nHis reviews confront this idea of an indistinguishable flow, and like Follow the Yellow Brick Road<\/em> hope that television drama and human experience aren\u2019t packaged like tins of dog food.<a href=\"#fn41-3817\" title=\"A few years later, reviewing the Arena<\/em> documentary ‘When Is A Play Not A Play?’ about drama documentary after the banning of Scum<\/em>, Potter observed Alasdair Milne’s comment that such productions are worrying when the “labelling goes wrong”, and thought “his words splendidly (and appropriately) convey the vocabulary and the attitudes of a man stocking up the supermarket shelves.” Dennis Potter, ‘The easy way to spot Brand X’, Sunday Times<\/em>, 23 April 1978.\" rel=\"footnote\">41<\/a><\/sup> Like Russell T. Davies, who said the \u201cT\u201d stood for \u201ctelevision\u201d, Potter was engaged with this popular medium that once made his “heart pound”. So, if we\u2019re to be cartographers drawing maps through Potter\u2019s work, we need to use much more of his non-fiction work. A published collection would be brilliant: important and entertaining, ranging from literary criticism and religious talks to Blake’s Seven<\/em>, party political broadcasts, sport and Swap Shop<\/em>, the latter prompting Potter to suggest swapping “Noel Edmonds for an equally hirsute gooseberry”,<a href=\"#fn42-3817\" title=\"Dennis Potter, ‘The Cup that cheers – and also inebriates’, Sunday Times<\/em>, 14 May 1978. A week earlier, another enduring light entertainment personality had drawn Potter’s eye: “There is a manic streak of delicious self-loathing in the English which makes us respond to such aggression [in Scorpion Tales<\/em>] and rudeness in a fictional character, and on […The Generation Game<\/em>] I was able to see for the first time why Bruce Forsyth (the most unlikely of all fictional characters) is so popular when he suddenly bared his teeth at the audience and gave them a look of utter contempt.” – ‘A whiff of sulphur’, Sunday Times<\/em>, 7 May 1978.\" rel=\"footnote\">42<\/a><\/sup> which shows us again that Potter’s work is often timeless. But the arrival of the Potter archive will be an important step.<\/p>\nThis is the edited text of a talk at the Dennis Potter Day at Dean Heritage Centre, Forest of Dean, 29 June 2013.<\/p>\nThanks to everyone at the Dean Heritage Centre on 29 June. Thanks also to Ian Greaves and John Williams.<\/p>\nSince this article was written, myself, Ian Greaves and John Williams have edited a collection of Dennis Potter’s non-fiction writing. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.oberonbooks.com\/dennis-potter.html\" target=\"_self\" rel=\"noopener\">Dennis Potter, The Art of Invective: Selected Non-Fiction 1953-1994<\/em><\/a> was published by <a href=\"https:\/\/www.oberonbooks.com\/Oberon Books\" target=\"_self\" rel=\"noopener\">Oberon Books<\/a> in 2015.<\/a><\/p>\nOriginally posted: 31 July 2013. \nUpdates: \n5 February 2017: added link to The Art of Invective.<\/em><\/p>\n<body> \n<script type=\"text\/javascript\">\nvar sc_project=5750652; \nvar sc_invisible=1; \nvar sc_partition=68; \nvar sc_click_stat=1; \nvar sc_security=\"6dd1aa39\"; \n<\/script><\/p>\n<script type=\"text\/javascript\"\nsrc=\"http:\/\/www.statcounter.com\/counter\/counter.js\"><\/script><noscript>\n<div \nclass=”statcounter”><a title=\"wordpress stats \" \nhref=”http:\/\/www.statcounter.com\/wordpress.org\/” \ntarget=”_blank”><img class=\"statcounter\" \nsrc=”http:\/\/c.statcounter.com\/5750652\/0\/6dd1aa39\/1\/” \nalt=”wordpress stats ” ><\/a><\/div>\n<\/noscript> \n<\/body><\/p>\n<hr class=\"footnotes\"><ol class=\"footnotes\" style=\"list-style-type:decimal\"><li id=\"fn1-3817\">This essay is an earlier – longer – draft version of a talk I gave at the Dennis Potter Day held at Dean Heritage Centre, Soudley, Forest of Dean on 29 June 2013. The <a href=\"http:\/\/www.deanheritagecentre.com\/pdf\/Potterscheduleofspeakers2013.pdf\" target=\"_self\" rel=\"noopener\">full schedule of the day’s events can be found here<\/a>. Some of this essay has been rewritten for reading rather than speaking, but most of the new or unused material is restricted to these endnotes. Detailed coverage of the event will appear on the Potter Matters blog, which we will link to when the event’s coverage is uploaded. <a href=\"#rf1-3817\" class=\"backlink\" title=\"Return to footnote 1.\">↩<\/a><\/p><\/li><li id=\"fn2-3817\">Heritage and “mediating memory” were vital and fascinating concepts in papers delivered by Joanne Garde-Hansen, Hannah Grist and Laura Earley. My comment here ties in with ideas of a “Forest of Dean Potter” and a “London Potter” raised in particular after the acquisition of Potter’s archive by the Dean Heritage Centre in the Forest of Dean, and subsequently tackled in Garde-Hansen’s paper. The “heritage” question related to how his work and archive can live on through exhibitions, archive access and activities. The screening at the event of the Rural Media Company’s film Buried Heart<\/em>, a piece “inspired” by Blue Remembered Hills<\/em> and featuring young people from the Forest of Dean, was one example of exciting possible outputs. Given that the audience consisted mostly of locals, with few visiting academics, the question of heritage was even more live. The site also includes a Dennis Potter audio trail, with family interviews accessible in places like a period classroom evocative of the ones in Stand Up Nigel Barton<\/em> and The Singing Detective<\/em>. The Potter audio trail doesn’t involve walking round in your pants listening to Potter’s voiceover from Blackeyes<\/em>. <a href=\"#rf2-3817\" class=\"backlink\" title=\"Return to footnote 2.\">↩<\/a><\/p><\/li><li id=\"fn3-3817\">Potter’s biographer, Humphrey Carpenter, can tell you which parties and people this might refer to. More to the point, Potter wrote in his non-fiction work about his disillusionment with attending Left gatherings of this sort. <a href=\"#rf3-3817\" class=\"backlink\" title=\"Return to footnote 3.\">↩<\/a><\/p><\/li><li id=\"fn4-3817\">Fortunately, in the first paper presented on the day, John Cook screened the opening of Moonlight on the Highway<\/em>. <a href=\"#rf4-3817\" class=\"backlink\" title=\"Return to footnote 4.\">↩<\/a><\/p><\/li><li id=\"fn5-3817\">Dennis Potter, \u2018Some Sort of Preface\u2019, Waiting for the Boat, p. 20. <a href=\"#rf5-3817\" class=\"backlink\" title=\"Return to footnote 5.\">↩<\/a><\/p><\/li><li id=\"fn6-3817\">Potter, in Lesley Thornton, ‘Innocence and Experience’, Radio Times<\/em>, 27 January – 2 February 1979, p. 9. <a href=\"#rf6-3817\" class=\"backlink\" title=\"Return to footnote 6.\">↩<\/a><\/p><\/li><li id=\"fn7-3817\">John Caughie, Television Drama: Realism, Modernism and British Culture<\/em> (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 173-174. <a href=\"#rf7-3817\" class=\"backlink\" title=\"Return to footnote 7.\">↩<\/a><\/p><\/li><li id=\"fn8-3817\">“the Forties thriller which Marlow is “writing” (or rewriting) in his mind” – Carpenter, pp. 439-440. <a href=\"#rf8-3817\" class=\"backlink\" title=\"Return to footnote 8.\">↩<\/a><\/p><\/li><li id=\"fn9-3817\">Antony Hilfer, \u2018Run Over by One\u2019s Own Story: Genre and Ethos in Dennis Potter\u2019s The Singing Detective<\/em>\u2019, in Jonathan Bignell, Stephen Lacey, Madeleine Macmurraugh-Kavanagh (editors), British Television Drama: Past, Present and Future<\/em> (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000), pp. 133-134. Marlow is \u201ca character run over by his own story\u201d. <a href=\"#rf9-3817\" class=\"backlink\" title=\"Return to footnote 9.\">↩<\/a><\/p><\/li><li id=\"fn10-3817\">I haven’t read Country Boy<\/em>, so here I am indebted to John Cook’s analysis of it. <a href=\"#rf10-3817\" class=\"backlink\" title=\"Return to footnote 10.\">↩<\/a><\/p><\/li><li id=\"fn11-3817\">For more on the ideas covered in this paragraph, see <a href=\"http:\/\/www.britishtelevisiondrama.org.uk\/?p=2164\" target=\"_self\" rel=\"noopener\">my piece on The Singing Detective<\/em><\/a>. Appropriately enough given that I’m talking here about writerly revision, I have an edited, rewritten form of that Singing Detective<\/em> piece forthcoming in the Journal of Screenwriting<\/em>, Volume 4, Number 3, 2013. <a href=\"#rf11-3817\" class=\"backlink\" title=\"Return to footnote 11.\">↩<\/a><\/p><\/li><li id=\"fn12-3817\">Given that I’ve quoted Potter’s views on biography in other pieces, here’s a more playful quotation, from his positive review of the book From Newgate to Dannemora: the Rise of the Penitentiary in New York<\/em>: “Biographies may, it is true, make great play of the fact that a man had piles or caught the 3.14 train on a sunny afternoon in mid-April. Such accumulation of tiny detail, such alleged Insight, seems to have become a characteristic of so-called quality journalism, and the rot has also infected all sorts of biographical studies. Too often we get a heap of pointless detail decorated with a scurfy impertinence, the kind of pseudo-academic opportunism typical of a time where you may find your tutor on the Eamon <\/em> [sic] Andrews Show<\/em>” – ‘The battle of the penologists’, New Society<\/em>, 19 August 1965, p. 27. <a href=\"#rf12-3817\" class=\"backlink\" title=\"Return to footnote 12.\">↩<\/a><\/p><\/li><li id=\"fn13-3817\">‘An Interview with Dennis Potter\u2019, Without Walls<\/em>, tx. Channel 4, 5 April 1994. <a href=\"#rf13-3817\" class=\"backlink\" title=\"Return to footnote 13.\">↩<\/a><\/p><\/li><li id=\"fn14-3817\">Dennis Potter, \u2018Telling Stories\u2019, New Society<\/em>, 15 May 1975, p. 419. <a href=\"#rf14-3817\" class=\"backlink\" title=\"Return to footnote 14.\">↩<\/a><\/p><\/li><li id=\"fn15-3817\">Potter, \u2018Telling Stories\u2019, p. 420. Potter’s childhood, and concerns with rewriting memory, also feature elsewhere, such as in a piece about Sankey’s Sacred Songs and Solos<\/em> – Potter, ‘Marching to Zion’, New Society<\/em>, 19 June 1975, p. 723. <a href=\"#rf15-3817\" class=\"backlink\" title=\"Return to footnote 15.\">↩<\/a><\/p><\/li><li id=\"fn16-3817\">Dennis Potter, in Graham Fuller, Potter on Potter<\/em> (London: Faber and Faber, 1993), p. 10. <a href=\"#rf16-3817\" class=\"backlink\" title=\"Return to footnote 16.\">↩<\/a><\/p><\/li><li id=\"fn17-3817\">John Bowen, \u2018David Copperfield\u2019s home movies\u2019, in John Glavin (editor), Dickens on Screen<\/em> (2003), p. 30. <a href=\"#rf17-3817\" class=\"backlink\" title=\"Return to footnote 17.\">↩<\/a><\/p><\/li><li id=\"fn18-3817\">Dickens scholars may be interested in Opium Blue<\/em> – Potter’s unmade adaptation\/completion of The Mystery of Edwin Drood<\/em> – or his suggestion of a drama about Dickens meeting Hans Christian Andersen, though that was apparently quite a sketchy idea as part of the pitch for a production deal with London Weekend Television and was not developed. (In both of those cases, I am again indebted to John Cook for his references to those pieces.) Potter’s book reviews included The Wild Swan<\/em>, Monica Stirling’s biography of Andersen: “Nostalgia of the most misleading kind mingles with our memories of stories heard in childhood.” – Potter, ‘Childhood bites man’, New Society<\/em>, 25 November 1965, pp. 30-31. Dickens’s Thomas Gradgrind features in his review of the book English versus Examinations<\/em>: ‘Even Gradgrind had a point’, New Society<\/em>, 30 September 1965, p. 27. <a href=\"#rf18-3817\" class=\"backlink\" title=\"Return to footnote 18.\">↩<\/a><\/p><\/li><li id=\"fn19-3817\">As Catrin Prys put it, the interconnections within memories that “build” into an “insight into […] self-knowledge” – Prys, p. 132. <a href=\"#rf19-3817\" class=\"backlink\" title=\"Return to footnote 19.\">↩<\/a><\/p><\/li><li id=\"fn20-3817\">I’m not talking about influence here, but correlations between the two texts through which each sheds light on the other. David Copperfield<\/em> also contains a form of primal scene, and the sense of sexuality being – in John Carey’s phrase – “driven underground”. Bowen writes about “the extraordinary and disruptive power of memory”, and how “Memory is vision before it is anything else”, and goes deeper to consider the extent to which this vision is, via Laura Mulvey, male-centred. <a href=\"#rf20-3817\" class=\"backlink\" title=\"Return to footnote 20.\">↩<\/a><\/p><\/li><li id=\"fn21-3817\">Dennis Potter, Hide and Seek<\/em>, p. 77. <a href=\"#rf21-3817\" class=\"backlink\" title=\"Return to footnote 21.\">↩<\/a><\/p><\/li><li id=\"fn22-3817\">This idea could be developed much further. Reading Gavin Lambert’s 1975 study of crime literature, The Dangerous Edge<\/em>, it seemed to me that Potter’s appropriation of genre went beyond the iconography, plotting and surface world inhabited by Marlow and instead grasped the layered dark side of writers like Eric Ambler. Not only does Ambler use a character called Marlow and a character (Charles Latimer) who writes detective stories – not that this displaces the importance of Raymond Chandler’s Marlowe to The Singing Detective<\/em> – but Ambler is aware of the face as “a screen to hide [his character’s] nakedness”, with links to Jung and the idea of persona. There is the psychoanalytic sense of impulses beneath the surface, the ape beneath the velvet, and a need to clean the (inside of the) body. Lambert’s discussion of Graham Greene is also relevant, not just because of The Third Man<\/em>‘s importance to the style of the noir sections of The Singing Detective<\/em>, but because Lambert discusses another Philip who experiences a primal scene and is dragged into adult lies in ‘The Basement Room’, which became the film The Fallen Idol<\/em>; scenes in which death and birth are paralleled; and a moment when a character “shot his own unbearable world”, which is one way of reading key scenes in Potter’s serial. Gavin Lambert, The Dangerous Edge<\/em> (New York: Grossman, 1975), pp. 119, 123, 128, 133, 145-146. See also the discussion of dreams, p. 156. Again, influence is not the key issue here, or else it would be time for a shot-by-shot comparison of The Singing Detective<\/em> with key sequences in Nicolas Roeg’s Bad Timing<\/em>. <a href=\"#rf22-3817\" class=\"backlink\" title=\"Return to footnote 22.\">↩<\/a><\/p><\/li><li id=\"fn23-3817\">Philip Purser, \u2018Dennis\u2019s Other Hat\u2019, in Vernon W. Gras and John R. Cook (editors), The Passion of Dennis Potter: International Collected Essays<\/em> (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), p. 179. Certainly studies of Potter have made intelligent selections from across his non-fiction work to illustrate selected features, such as the Hoggartian studies of everyday social habits in his early columns through to direct comments on his plays. He does sometimes reflect on his plays in different contexts – for instance, when reviewing Forgotten Love Songs<\/em>, he talks about “botching Casanova<\/em>“. <a href=\"#rf23-3817\" class=\"backlink\" title=\"Return to footnote 23.\">↩<\/a><\/p><\/li><li id=\"fn24-3817\">This is a pretty thin point, suggesting an auteurist-textual reading that was slightly out of keeping with the rest of the day, which suggested refreshing, exciting new developments for Potter studies in line with new developments in the field. <a href=\"#rf24-3817\" class=\"backlink\" title=\"Return to footnote 24.\">↩<\/a><\/p><\/li><li id=\"fn25-3817\">Dennis Potter, \u2018Boy in a Landscape\u2019, New Statesman<\/em>, 29 March, p. 459. <a href=\"#rf25-3817\" class=\"backlink\" title=\"Return to footnote 25.\">↩<\/a><\/p><\/li><li id=\"fn26-3817\">Potter, Hide and Seek<\/em>, p. 20. <a href=\"#rf26-3817\" class=\"backlink\" title=\"Return to footnote 26.\">↩<\/a><\/p><\/li><li id=\"fn27-3817\">Having said that… Follow the Yellow Brick Road<\/em> and non-fiction pieces describe an incident involving Potter on a bike with God being “too near” that resembles a scene with a demon in Penda’s Fen<\/em>, though that operates in the fusion of religion, politics, sexuality and Elgar circulating at that stage of the play, and leads to a devastating seemingly hallucinatory ritual sequence. <a href=\"#rf27-3817\" class=\"backlink\" title=\"Return to footnote 27.\">↩<\/a><\/p><\/li><li id=\"fn28-3817\">Potter, \u2018Boy in a Landscape\u2019, New Statesman<\/em>, 29 March, p. 459. <a href=\"#rf28-3817\" class=\"backlink\" title=\"Return to footnote 28.\">↩<\/a><\/p><\/li><li id=\"fn29-3817\">Dennis Potter, \u2018Switch Back\u2019, New Statesman<\/em>, 7 March 1975, p. 319. He again uses “the funny farm” in relation to television in his review of Clive James’s Visions Before Midnight<\/em> – see later endnote for reference. <a href=\"#rf29-3817\" class=\"backlink\" title=\"Return to footnote 29.\">↩<\/a><\/p><\/li><li id=\"fn30-3817\">Dennis Potter, \u2018The great BBC balancing act\u2019, Sunday Times<\/em>, 19 February 1978. <a href=\"#rf30-3817\" class=\"backlink\" title=\"Return to footnote 30.\">↩<\/a><\/p><\/li><li id=\"fn31-3817\">Relegated to an endnote in concern about giving a spoiler to a 35-year-old series: the programme’s writer appears as a hitman in the guise of a version of WC Fields and kills the previously indestructible lead character with a single touch of his hand. <a href=\"#rf31-3817\" class=\"backlink\" title=\"Return to footnote 31.\">↩<\/a><\/p><\/li><li id=\"fn32-3817\">Though it was made on 21 and 22 February 1978. John Izod, Karl Magee, Kathryn Hannan and Isabelle Gourdin-Sangouard, Lindsay Anderson: Cinema Authorship<\/em> (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012), p. 191. Subsequently referred to as Izod et al, Lindsay Anderson<\/em>. <a href=\"#rf32-3817\" class=\"backlink\" title=\"Return to footnote 32.\">↩<\/a><\/p><\/li><li id=\"fn33-3817\">Anderson found it “disappointing that critics who spend so much of their time bemoaning the lack of experiment and innovation on television should rush so enthusiastically to club to death a piece which, at the very least, showed a great deal of innovative daring.” Lindsay Anderson, letter to Michael Grade, 18 July 1979, quoted in Izod et al, p. 198. Perhaps my subsequent description of Anderson’s “Brechtian” approach is less accurate a description than satirical, surreal and like Bunuel – ibid, p. 199. <a href=\"#rf33-3817\" class=\"backlink\" title=\"Return to footnote 33.\">↩<\/a><\/p><\/li><li id=\"fn34-3817\">Julian Barnes, ‘Land of Lost Content’, New Statesman<\/em>, 2 February 1979, p. 159. Quoted in Izod et al, p. 196. <a href=\"#rf34-3817\" class=\"backlink\" title=\"Return to footnote 34.\">↩<\/a><\/p><\/li><li id=\"fn35-3817\">“Anderson had no high regard for television reviewers in the press, most of whom seemed to him to have an extraordinary disregard of the work they commented on.” Izod et al, p. 195. Izod et al, drawing on Erik Hedling’s work, place hostility to Anderson in the context of standards of television reviewing. This is well done, and readers of Lindsay Anderson<\/em> might want to update it with reference to <a href=\"http:\/\/jumpingbeanbag.com\/derision-before-midnight\/\" target=\"_self\" rel=\"noopener\">Phil Norman’s excellent post on television reviewers here<\/a>, although I don’t necessarily agree with the specifics of every Old Crowd<\/em> review that Lindsay Anderson<\/em> gives as evidence. Clive James’s review of The Old Crowd<\/em> draws the response that Clive James ‘showcased himself’ rather than write on his topic. Potter’s review of James’s Visions Before Midnight<\/em> describes his Observer<\/em> reviews as “stunning” and finds “extremely moving” James’s statement that “Television is for everybody. It follows that a television critic, at his best, is everybody too – he must enjoy diversity without being eclectic and stay receptive without being gulled.” We might playfully consider the response of Anderson – previously a film critic – to Potter’s statement that “Those who get bitten by a critic’s vulpine fangs almost always cry out, in the agony of their little death, for the salve of “constructive criticism” with which to bind up their torn flesh. James rightly dismisses this standard ploy as ‘the eternal plea of the kitsch-merchant’.” Dennis Potter, ‘Glop’, 22 April 1977, p. 535. Given that Anderson once called James “the thinking man’s Rolf Harris”, we can only speculate – Anderson, letter to Jeremy Isaacs, 18 July 1979, quoted in Izod et al, n91, p. 205. If Anderson was more aware of television drama than he indicated in interviews, he may have shared Potter’s concern (in relation to Gangsters<\/em>) with types and effectivity of non-naturalistic forms – the “quality of response” I talk about in the next paragraph. <a href=\"#rf35-3817\" class=\"backlink\" title=\"Return to footnote 35.\">↩<\/a><\/p><\/li><li id=\"fn36-3817\">John Cook, Dennis Potter: A Life on Screen<\/em> Second Edition (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), p. 144. <a href=\"#rf36-3817\" class=\"backlink\" title=\"Return to footnote 36.\">↩<\/a><\/p><\/li><li id=\"fn37-3817\">Potter, introduction to script, p. 148. Or, as he put it elsewhere, a Robin Day and pinging spittoon choice. <a href=\"#rf37-3817\" class=\"backlink\" title=\"Return to footnote 37.\">↩<\/a><\/p><\/li><li id=\"fn38-3817\">Loach noted that “we were following the news so we tried to work in the style of World in Action [\u2026] so that people didn’t think ‘we’ve had the facts and now we will have the fiction’ but rather ‘we’ve had the facts \u2013 now here\u2019s some more facts with a different point of view'” – John Hill, \u2018Finding a form: politics and aesthetics in Fatherland<\/em>, Hidden Agenda<\/em> and Riff-Raff<\/em>\u2019, in George McKnight (ed), Agent of Challenge and Defiance<\/em>, Trowbridge: Flicks Books, p. 160). If “texts do their work in contexts”, drama-documentary “occupied a progressive role” not only because it “introduced into the discourses of television a repressed political, social discourse”, but because it might in turn shape the audience\u2019s “scepticism of the other representations which television offers” – John Caughie, ‘Progressive Television and Documentary Drama’, Screen<\/em>, Volume 21, Number 3, pp. 33-34. There’s more on this in Dave Rolinson, \u2018Small Screens and Big Voices: Televisual Social Realism and the Popular\u2019, in David Tucker (ed), British Social Realism in the Arts since 1940<\/em> (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). <a href=\"#rf38-3817\" class=\"backlink\" title=\"Return to footnote 38.\">↩<\/a><\/p><\/li><li id=\"fn39-3817\">Certainly there\u2019s something about the transitions between songs and “reality” in Pennies from Heaven<\/em> that is jolting above and beyond the usual reference points of “non-naturalism”. There are interesting reasons and possible effects of Potter wanting to do the hospital scenes in The Singing Detective<\/em> in studio on video, in the context of what others in the industry were saying about, and doing with, studio at that time. Potter talked about wanting those scenes in the studio because he wanted them in what was still the dominant language of television naturalism, the language with which audiences were familiar. <a href=\"#rf39-3817\" class=\"backlink\" title=\"Return to footnote 39.\">↩<\/a><\/p><\/li><li id=\"fn40-3817\">Jason Griffiths’ paper on the day included audio recordings of Potter’s family at home in the 1960s, a lovely underlining of the need to engage with the everyday. The day showed that Potter can be just as much a part of new methods of television scholarship as he was of the old ones. Indeed, if the first part of the day seemed to be likely to include textual analysis from experienced Potter scholars, speakers like Glen Creeber were keen to place their analysis in relation to their personal responses and experiences as viewers (seamlessly slotting in alongside John Belcher’s hugely entertaining talk on growing up in the Forest in the 1950s, a last-minute replacement paper that I think actually ended up being pretty much central to the day). This is just one of the ways in which the presence of locals improved the event, as well as making for such a lovely, friendly day. The presence of brass band and other music wafting into the marquee from a 1950s nostalgia event held the same day only added to this sense of heritage; as speakers commented, it was ‘Potteresque’. <a href=\"#rf40-3817\" class=\"backlink\" title=\"Return to footnote 40.\">↩<\/a><\/p><\/li><li id=\"fn41-3817\">A few years later, reviewing the Arena<\/em> documentary ‘When Is A Play Not A Play?’ about drama documentary after the banning of Scum<\/em>, Potter observed Alasdair Milne’s comment that such productions are worrying when the “labelling goes wrong”, and thought “his words splendidly (and appropriately) convey the vocabulary and the attitudes of a man stocking up the supermarket shelves.” Dennis Potter, ‘The easy way to spot Brand X’, Sunday Times<\/em>, 23 April 1978. <a href=\"#rf41-3817\" class=\"backlink\" title=\"Return to footnote 41.\">↩<\/a><\/p><\/li><li id=\"fn42-3817\">Dennis Potter, ‘The Cup that cheers – and also inebriates’, Sunday Times<\/em>, 14 May 1978. A week earlier, another enduring light entertainment personality had drawn Potter’s eye: “There is a manic streak of delicious self-loathing in the English which makes us respond to such aggression [in Scorpion Tales<\/em>] and rudeness in a fictional character, and on […The Generation Game<\/em>] I was able to see for the first time why Bruce Forsyth (the most unlikely of all fictional characters) is so popular when he suddenly bared his teeth at the audience and gave them a look of utter contempt.” – ‘A whiff of sulphur’, Sunday Times<\/em>, 7 May 1978. <a href=\"#rf42-3817\" class=\"backlink\" title=\"Return to footnote 42.\">↩<\/em><\/p><\/li><\/p><\/ol><\/hr>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":null,"protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[140,137],"tags":[35,391,392,86,34,390,386,167,394,393,389,387,388,187],"class_list":["post-3817","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-david-rolinson","category-essays","tag-alan-clarke","tag-charles-dickens","tag-david-copperfield","tag-david-rudkin","tag-dennis-potter","tag-eric-ambler","tag-follow-the-yellow-brick-road","tag-gangsters","tag-gavin-lambert","tag-graham-greene","tag-lindsay-anderson","tag-pendas-fen","tag-the-old-crowd","tag-the-singing-detective"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.britishtelevisiondrama.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3817","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.britishtelevisiondrama.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.britishtelevisiondrama.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.britishtelevisiondrama.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.britishtelevisiondrama.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3817"}],"version-history":[{"count":110,"href":"http:\/\/www.britishtelevisiondrama.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3817\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8280,"href":"http:\/\/www.britishtelevisiondrama.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3817\/revisions\/8280"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.britishtelevisiondrama.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3817"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.britishtelevisiondrama.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3817"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.britishtelevisiondrama.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3817"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}