Programmes from heaven | Dennis Potter
Great interviews of the 20th centuryDennis Potter This article is more than 29 years oldProgrammes from heaven
This article is more than 29 years oldFrom the archive: Television's greatest writer is deadIn that brave and famous last interview Dennis Potter, who has died aged 59, made what he almost seemed to see as a confession to his audience: "I do have a sense of vocation ... I'm proud of it ... I'm no longer ashamed of saying I have it." That sense of quasi-religious dedication to his vision and his craft lies under almost everything he has said about the torrent of plays he poured on to our television screens for nearly 30 years. He described The Singing Detective, his most autobiographical work, written in 1985, in Biblical terms. It was, he said, about a man who picks up his bed and walks.
He was born in 1935, the bright son of a poor miner in the Forest of Dean, and he went up the hill to chapel twice every Sunday. The post-war Education Act took him, like many of his generation, to grammar school and then to New College, Oxford. He went from university to the BBC, moved to the Daily Herald, and was briefly a leader writer when the Herald turned into the (pre-Murdoch) Sun. Thwarted political ambition, then his worsening physical condition, drove him to write the two Nigel Barton plays, because he was unable to do anything else, and he had a wife and three small children. He lived by and for writing ever after.
He often felt misunderstood - both by professional critics and by those outraged by his work, most bitterly over Blackeyes. An earlier play, Brimstone And Treacle, was banned by the BBC from 1976 to 1987.
Despite the ban, the BBC in the late 70s, when Potter wrote two of his finest plays - Blue Remembered Hills and Pennies From Heaven - remained his icon of what a public service broadcasting organisation should be. His best work changed television drama forever, because it expanded the medium and defied its dogged naturalism. He was lucky to be writing for the small screen as television drama emerged from the restrictions - or the creative challenges - of studio production. The Singing Detective proved that Potter could not stand still; it gave a political edge to the form he had developed to combine popular entertainment with social comment. From what he has said about his two plays yet to be seen, Karaoke and Cold Lazarus, Potter never did stand still. He was climbing the hill to the chapel right to the end.
This report, which included tributes from colleagues and critics, ran in the Guardian the day after Dennis Potter's death.
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