- Born
- Died
- Birth nameDennis Christopher George Potter
- Dennis Christopher George Potter was born 17 May 1935 in Berry Hill, a small village in the Forest of Dean, where his grandfather and father were coal miners. Through books, the young Potter found that "words were chariots". He attended school in London and spent two years in the Army. During his three years at Oxford, he wrote The Glittering Coffin (1960), a bitter attack on England.
As a BBC trainee, he wrote/hosted Between Two Rivers (1960), a documentary about the Forest of Dean. In 1961 he joined the Daily Herald, where he was TV critic (1962-64). In 1964 he learned he had psoriatic arthropathy, a disease which plagued him for decades, less so after new drugs/treatments turned up. He lost the 1964 election as a Labour candidate, ending his planned political career. That same year, The Wednesday Play (1964) began on the BBC, and he submitted a novel-in-progress, which became his first TV play, The Confidence Course (1965), about motivational seminar swindlers.
Over three decades, he wrote novels, essays, stage plays, and movies but mainly focused on TV, where his semi-autobiographical explorations into consciousness and memory led to innovations in drama, often acclaimed. His masterpiece is The Singing Detective (1986), regarded by some as the best original work ever created for television. Only near the end of his life did he move into directing with Blackeyes (1989) and Secret Friends (1991). Steven Bochco's Cop Rock (1990) is just one example of Potter's widening influence.
Few Potter plays aired on USA TV, but retrospectives were at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts and NYC's Museum of Television & Radio. His plays and interviews are part of the MT&R's permanent collection, available for viewing in NYC and also at the MT&R in Los Angeles.- IMDb Mini Biography By: Bhob Stewart <bhob@genie.com>
- SpouseMargaret Morgan(January 10, 1959 - May 29, 1994) (her death, 3 children)
- Children
- Musicals where the actors lip-sync to classic songs
- He hated Rupert Murdoch so much that when he discovered he had cancer he named it 'Rupert'.
- The British Academy of Film and Television Arts have an award named after him, presented annually for outstanding writing for television.
- He graduated from New College, Oxford University, with a second class degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics.
- Producer Kenith Trodd, who worked closely with him for years, sees the events of his life as ideal for a biographical film drama: "I don't know whether it'll ever come off, but I want, at some point, probably for television, to do a Dennis Potter biopic. I haven't yet homed in on how we'd do it, who would write it or whether the character would be called Dennis Potter. But I know that in that life, there is a terrific story."
- He was lampooned in a Spitting Image (1984) song that was never broadcast, but revived on YouTube.
- [commenting on the actor Denholm Elliott] He has a manner which suggests that he is about to preside with great dignity at a court martial, yet also to be cashiered in cringing disgrace at one and the same time, and that either pose is for him a matter both of raging disgust and total indifference.
- The trouble with words is that you never know whose mouths they have been in.
- [on BBC Director-General John Birt and Chairman Marmaduke Hussey] You cannot make a pair of croak-voiced Daleks appear benevolent even if you dress one of them in an Armani suit and call the other Marmaduke.
- [MacTaggart lecture at the Edinburgh International Television Festival 1993] Let me remind myself of how to paint the clouds with sunshine. I first saw television when I was in my late teens. It made my heart pound. Here was a medium of great power, of potentially wondrous delights, that could slice through all the tedious hierarchies of the printed word and help to emancipate us from many of the stifling tyrannies of class and status and gutter-press ignorance. We're privileged if we can work in this, the most entrancing of all the many palaces of variety. Switch on, tune in and grow. I hope it's clear by now that I happen to care very much about the medium that has both allowed and shaped the bulk of my life's work and even my life's meaning.
- BBC2 offers us, for the first time, a genuinely planned alternative instead of a haphazard chase up the ratings table.
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