Dennis Potter

As with LIPSTICK ON YOUR COLLAR, the later re-working of this play, most of the action is set within the 1956 War Office in the midst of the Cold War and just prior to and contemporaneous with the Suez Crisis. Private Robert Hawk is the newly-arrived Russian language clerk. He is the son of a Yorkshire coalminer and a graduate of grammar school and of Oxford. He is doing his two years of national service. His job at the War Office is to assist the MI3 section in the translation of intercepted Russian documents on troop movements. Hawk is caught between his own working class roots and the upper middle class values and behaviours of the officers he works with. They mock him for his background, his immaturity and his intellectualism. He is also caught between his almost adolescent romantic idealisation of women as he sees them portrayed, for example, in his visit to the theatre to see Chekhov’s The Seagull and his equally adolescent sexual drives which lead him to consort with a prostitute for sexual release. He survives all this by inventing personalities for himself so that, in a pub and surrounded by football fanatics, he asserts his status by pretending to be (and convincing the fans that he actually is) the Russian national team goalkeeper. His deception fails when an old friend, Pete, comes into the pub and inadvertently unmasks him. To impress Pete that he holds an important position at the War Office, Hawk sets out to obtain a classified document but Pete fails to arrive at the rendezvous and the document is discarded.Read More »

Moonlight on the Highway is a television play by Dennis Potter, first broadcast on 12 April 1969 as part of ITV’s Saturday Night Theatre strand. The tale of a young Al Bowlly obsessive attempting to blot out memories of sexual abuse via his fixation with the singer, the play was the first of Potter’s works to use popular music as a dramatic device and strongly anticipated Potter’s later ‘serials with songs’ Pennies from Heaven (1978), The Singing Detective (1986) and Lipstick on Your Collar (1993).Read More »

First filmed theatrically in 1962, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s final novel, TENDER IS THE NIGHT, was given a lavish (seven million dollars) treatment in this British-Australian-American miniseries version. Set in Europe’s waning days of the Roaring Twenties, the plot focused upon the tempestuous marriage between jaded psychiatrist Dick Diver (Peter Strauss) and the beautiful, schizophrenic socialite Nicole Warren (Mary Steenburgen). An international cast did an excellent job impersonating the “Lost Generation” for which Fitzgerald was the principal spokesman (the author was himself all but burned out by the time the original novel was published, and his desperation oozes through every page).Read More »

After a brief tutelage with innovative BBC documentary producer Denis Mitchell, Dennis Potter teamed with producer Anthony de Lotbiniere to film a documentary (later described by David Niven as “absolutely wonderful”). Returning to the Berry Hill roots of his childhood, Potter used interviews with locals (including his parents) to show changes in the working-class traditions of the Forest of Dean, where “the green forest has a deep black heart beneath its sudden hills, pushing up slag heaps and gray little villages clustering around the coal.”Read More »

Transmitted on 13th October 1965 at 9.05 p.m. on BBC 1 as part of the Wednesday Play series. Repeated on 6th July 1966 on BBC1

The play is a fictionalised account of the relationship between Charles Dodgson and Alice Liddell. It cleverly integrates events, conversations and chance remarks into the narrative which later become part of the “Alice” books but more than anything it’s a touching story of unrequited love where frustration and innocence co-exist but never quite resolve their conflict. It was later remade as the film ‘Dreamchild’.Read More »