Dennis Potter
| Dennis Potter | |
|---|---|
Cover of The Life and Work of Dennis Potter
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| Born | 17 May 1935 Berry Hill, Gloucestershire, England, United Kingdom |
| Died | 7 June 1994 (aged 59) Ross-on-Wye, Hereford and Worcester (now Herefordshire), England, United Kingdom |
| Occupation | Television playwright, director, novelist, author, screenwriter, journalist |
| Nationality | British |
| Period | 1960–1994 |
| Genre | Drama |
| Notable works |
Pennies from Heaven (1978) Blue Remembered Hills (1979) The Singing Detective (1986) |
| Spouse | Margaret Morgan (m. 1959–1994) |
Dennis Christopher George Potter (17 May 1935 – 7 June 1994) was an English television dramatist, screenwriter and journalist.
After standing for parliament as a Labour candidate at the 1964 general election, his health was affected by the onset of psoriatic arthropathy which led to him becoming a playwright. He initially worked in journalism before making the transition to television drama. His new career began with contributions to the BBC's Wednesday Play anthology series in 1965, and continued to work in the medium for the next thirty years. He is best known for his BBC TV serials Pennies from Heaven (1978), The Singing Detective (1986), and the television plays Blue Remembered Hills (1979) and Brimstone and Treacle (1976). His television dramas mixed fantasy and reality, the personal and the social and often used themes and images from popular culture. Potter is widely regarded as one of the most influential and innovative dramatists to have worked in British television.
Dennis Potter was born in Berry Hill, Forest of Dean, Gloucestershire. His father, Walter Edward Potter (26 April 1906 – November 1975), was a coal miner in this rural mining area between Gloucester and Wales; his mother was Margaret Constance, née Wale (25 August 1910– August 2001). Potter has a sister named June.
In 1946, Potter passed the eleven-plus and attended Bell's Grammar School at Coleford. The ten-year-old Potter was sexually abused by his uncle, an experience he would later allude to many times in his writing. During his speech at the 1993 James MacTaggart Memorial Lecture, Potter referred to this event when explaining his decision to switch from newspaper journalism to screenwriting: "Different words had to be found, with different functions. But why? Why, why, why; the same desperately repeated question I asked myself without any sort of an answer, or any ability to tell my mother or my father, when at the age of ten, between V.E. Day and V.J. Day, I was trapped by an adult's sexual appetite and abused out of innocence." Between 1953 and 1955, Potter did his National Service and learnt Russian at the Joint Services School for Linguists.
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