Dennis Potter - was he right or was he right?

And of course he was very, very pop.

I think in later, cancer afflicted years he suffered from being too revered by the arts establishment, like some kind of British Kubrick. I don't think that helps an artist. I did love the last interview he did with Melvyn Bragg though - just to see that force of 'nothing concentrates a man's mind so much as the knowledge he is to be hanged in the morning' spirit. Never quite got why his dying wish was for Karaoke and Cold Lazarus to be shown on both BBC and C4 though - why did that matter?

His trick of having actors lipsynch to pop songs - absolutely classic and I can't blame him for stringing it out over three series.

karaoke and cold laz were classic examples of why EVERYONE needs honest in-sync editors who can say NO to them sometimes: DP, dying, was in a position to end-run all that — and fair enough in terms of the hassle would have been for him — but all it meant is that the (artistic) work is passed on to the viewers...

Has anyone seen the film yet? Can't begin to imagine really... even though it's Potter's own screenplay isn't it?

it was brilliant.

d.potter is great

blackeyes is good

Track 29: that was a bizarre little film.

I'd love to see the original Brimstone & Treacle. Althugh I think the film with Sting is pretty good as well.I remember liking Christabel the one time I saw it but don't really remember anything about it. Dreamchild is worth watching.

I think the BBC has released a lot of the early teleplays on DVD now but they may not be region free and certainly won't be cheap.

There was a time, 1980s-1990s, when a lot of my life seemed to involve hanging around while the rest of the world admired such things. It strikes me now that that aspect of my life seems to have disappeared somewhat.

Contains - The Singing Detective; Pennies From Heaven; Casanova; Brimstone And Treacle; Stand Up Nigel Barton; Vote, Vote, Vote For Nigel Barton; Blue Remembered Hills and The Mayor Of Casterbridge.

It doesn't help that people have portrayed him as a saint-figure and his work as untouchable, as the reality is rather more interesting. Some up-thread here, and esp. K-Punk in his blog, have explored the depths of his work. The tension between his conservatism (something of the rural and anti-C19th romanticism of William Morris) and professed radicalism (Brechtian form, esp. in "Pennies from Heaven", Williams/Hoggartian studies of class displacement and politics in the Barton plays) is what makes his work quite what it is. He's a bit like David Lynch in combining great formal invention with conflicting views on tradition and rural (for Lynch the suburban) conservatism.

"The Singing Detective" is pure television, in its most moving, jolting fashion - a window on Potter's world, and crucially mediated by brilliant acting, production and direction. Where Beckett meets Raymond Chandler meets Laurie Lee, somehow. Dismissing it as mere 'misanthropy' is clearly missing the point and a great deal else. It actually manages to be optimistic by the end, with Marlow walking out of the hospital, readier to embrace life than death. And the bitter is typically interposed with the spine-tingingly sentimental - use of *"those songs..."*, scenes such as the recalled bird whistling to music of his father, alongside the man his wife is cheating on. A tableau of the unease underlying a movingly Hoggartian tableau of working-class life, in a Forest of Dean public house. And it's got Bill Paterson, who is wonderful in a role which could have been utterly perfunctory, c.f. deus-ex-machina. I bet that this is so in the film version.

Potter was actually rather spiritual (if not openly or professedly religious), in the way he portrays rural England, particularly of course where he grew up. Other works to consider in relation to this: Alan Bennett's "A Day Out" (i absolutely love this... a low-key encapsulation of the Edwardian 'golden summer' before WW1, and the tensions again between socialism and the countryside), David Rudkin's "Penda's Fen"...

haven't seen them yet though

Not to mention Pennies From Heaven being Moulin Rouge twenty years before it happened (mind you, ever seen the film - Steve Martin is terrible).

Arrrgh, if only they had been lip-synching to great records in MR (and the cuts had come about 100 times less frequently. And there was a screenplay).

Steve Martin is not terrible in the Hollywood Pennies.

How right-wing could he have been if he named his cancer after Murdoch?

Anyone been watching the Singing Detective? or watched it lately? its so good. plus Joanne Whalley circa. 1986 is my current celebrity crush,

I'm halfway through the Pennies from Heaven series, watching for the first time since, ummm, the late '70s. I'd forgotten the plot more than some of the music cues! And that Arthur is essentially a psychopath (not sure if in the last three episodes this will further diagnose his trauma as a soldier in the Great War, which is the crux of his monologue to the other salesmen in the pub in Episode 2).

Hoskins is just great, and the two female leads are solid. And while you know the song-mime is coming in most of the lengthy dramatic scenes, you're never really anticipating it.

I also think contemporary PBS would be extremely skittish about broadcasting this in America today, that's how fucking retrograde it is. They'd let BBC America have it.

Didn't remember the scene in the music shop at the end of ep 4, where Arthur and Eileeen smash up records as his liberation! Traumatic for many viewers among you I bet.

I remember the family glued to the TV watching 'The Singing Detective', which is maybe a bit weird. My mother loves it. There's a good article on Potter on this months Sight and Sound. There's a bunch of his stuff on youtube now so I'm having a little Potter season (something Brit TV should get on). Watched 'Brimstone and Treacle' and 'Blade on a Feather'. Incredible stuff. A far cry from today's Brit TV drama.

Hywel Bennett sticks in my mind as being brilliantly creepy in PFH. haven't seen it since it's BBC2 re-run in 1990 mind.

the singing detective is, I think, still the most amazing television event ever.

well, I'll rewatch that... sometime this year.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFDlz9WwpVY

the commentary by the director & producer on the PfH discs (ep 1 & 6) are worth shuffling through

really really wish some of his other stuff (esp Lipstick on Your Collar and Cold Lazarus) were available in the US on DVD

I was wondering about specific hommages to DP in American TV (besides Bochco's short-lived Cop Rock) and lo, in the sixth-ever episode of The Sopranos, Tony is having a sex dream about Melfi and starts to mime "What Time Is It?"

Chase def took some notes from Potter

Lynch too

some of Ray Wise's singing bits in TP seem reminiscent, although I don't think he specifically lip-syncs. and there's the Jimmy Scott bit in the series finale but he's obviously not miming either.

latest Mad Men season finale

in the Bobby Morse thing, he's actually the singer tho, but I can see in Brechtian disruption etc there are similarities (ie post-hanging happy ending in PfH)

I saw the '81 Hollywood feature flop version of Pennies from Heaven last night, projected in 35mm, possibly for the first time since it was new. It left me cold then because it just seemed a reduction of the series -- ie what Steve Martin called "the greatest fucking thing I ever saw -- except of course it was a big-budget production with Ken Adam sets, Bob Mackie costumes, Gordon Willis A-1 lighting, etc. Martin and Bernadette Peters are fine, she esp in the musical numbers and after her character's "fall." But I still got the gnawing sense that they didn't know quite how to pick what they were going for, which is maybe why Arthur's fetishes (elevator sex, lipstick on the nipples) seem more ill-fitting then when Hoskins played him.

Christopher Walken's leering pimp is great in his one scene, and then he starts to dance.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54iR0xFkEfQ

been awhile since I've seen it but it deserved to flop, it somehow misses the jarring juxtapositions that make the original work so well

I don't know, it was pretty ambitious in the year of Stripes.

Potter said he went through 13 drafts of a script for MGM.

Fred Astaire saw it and was appalled.

well ok "deserved" is harsh but it its deficiencies outweigh its virtues

Caught Brimstone and Treacle (the original Play for Today EP) and its amazing to watch, someone should do a repeat on TV. The whole convo around immigration, the change in the character of British society. Perceptions and what ought to be done - the desire to turn the clock back, and whether to do so by a minute or an hour or a day. Incredible yet depressing that conversation toward the end felt so RIGHT NOW (there are other dimensions too - the sheer emotional Labour of caring for a disabled loved one, then the social commentary around the lack of good quality care, and most interestingly the turning of the clock back as both state-of-nation AND the wish for things to go back to a happier time which could also mean 'we could be a family again')

Everything else I've seen by DP has been either too unbalanced or tacked-on thick. Like Jarman, it looks like he was indulged (DP as a marker of quality) and the results aren't worth a lot but from a watch of this you can see why he was given that treatment later on.

further to the David Lynch connection mentioned upthread

I don't know if she liked, or even finished, my novel. It didn't matter: with David Lynch on the verge of signing, his girlfriend Isabella Rossellini was to star. Lynch insisted on it. Well, she was beautiful and intelligent too. We were, of course, endlessly discussing actors and actresses. There is scarcely a star of either sex in Hollywood or elsewhere who has not appeared in the imagined movie. Boy-actors, once considered to play Lisa's step-son Kolya, are now too old for any part.

There was now also an impressive new screenwriter - Dennis Potter. I wrote to him saying how pleased I was. We had so much in common: working-class boys from isolated mining communities; going in the same year to the same Oxford college. In fact, I have a vivid memory of seeing him acting, redhaired and charismatic, in a Pirandello play performed in New College garden - the very place where my novel had been born. It all seemed perfect synchronicity. To cap it all, he was living just 20 miles from Hereford, in his native Forest of Dean. I proposed we should meet midway for a drink. Potter replied with a brief refusal, saying that he believed meetings should happen by chance.

Maybe he was so committed to his task that he was loath to let a conversation with the book's author get in the way of his vision for the screenplay. There was no doubting his commitment, to judge by reports of his first meeting with Lynch, in the fall of 1990. A day of Biblical rain in New York... a winey dinner... On parting, Potter's face streamed with tears as his crippled, arthritic hands grasped Lynch's lapels. If they didn't screw it up, he said, if they saw it through to the end, this would be the work they would both be remembered by. "This movie will be the Madame Bovary of our time."

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2004/aug/28/books.featuresreviews

and here's Mark Frost

I’d determined very early on from a writing standpoint that I wanted to have a lot of fun with layering the show. The most seminal work in my development as a writer was probably that of Dennis Potter, particularly The Singing Detective and Pennies From Heaven.

I thought that if you could put that kind of detail and that amount of layering into an ongoing show, not just a limited six- or seven-part series, then you might really have something interesting. There was definitely a conscious effort from day one to try to fill people’s minds with details, and the effect was staggering. I remember about halfway through the airing of the first season, someone came in and dumped on my desk maybe 500 pages of internet chatter about the show – and this was at a point where the internet was only just emerging as something people used for basic communication. But here were these entire forums dedicated to exploring just one aspect of plotting, something which had taken maybe 15 minutes to think up, yet was clearly sending people off on these scavenger hunts through all of popular culture. We discovered that if we put a lot of detail in, there were people that would pay attention and look beneath the surface of things in anticipation of some payoff at a later date. That was a revelation at the time, and it certainly made the show a lot of fun to work on.

outside of singing detective (which I've always loved), karaoke and cold lazarus (the latter of which I've never seen), and pennies from heaven (still haven't watched); which available potter teleplays are worthy?

Lipstick On Your Collar!

Amazed at these Lynch/Frost connections tbh

xposts: don't know where it stands critically in regard to his other work, but i really liked his casanova from the early seventies. other early things of his i'd watch again: moonlight on the highway and lay down your arms... the latter a precursor to lipstick on your collar (& much better!)

earlier is better. Blue Remembered Hills is the standout. TV version of Brimstone and Treacle is as unique as xyzzzz says, Nigel Barton plays might be a bit parochial for non-Britishes but felt true to me as a teenager.

i'd watch anything pre-Singing Detective tbh. it's after then that quality control severely declined imo.

"Blade On The Feather" is a really good one

looks like most of them have been put onto youtube by courteous potter fans as well

which available potter teleplays are worthy?

Lipstick On Your Collar was my first and I adored it - I can see thinking of it as an exaggeration or decline if you'd come up on him earlier, but I rewatched the whole thing after I'd seen more Potter and still loved it.

Blue Remembered Hills and Brimstone are the best of the TV one-offs I've seen, but in Australia in the 90s, pickings were slim.

haven't seen Pennies For Heaven yet either.

Am reading his "Singing Detective" script at the moment - this thread reminded me I had it! - before diving into the TV version. Love "Pennies From Heaven", the BBC Play For Today pieces...