Dennis Christopher George Potter (May 17, 1935 – June 7, 1994) was a controversial British dramatist who is best known for several widely acclaimed television dramas which mixed fantasy and reality, the personal and the social. He was particularly fond of using themes and images from popular culture.
Potter was born in the Forest of Dean, Gloucestershire. His father was a coalminer in the Forest of Dean, a rural industrial area between Gloucester and Wales. He won a scholarship to New College, Oxford, and started work for the BBC in the late 1950s. He also worked as a journalist and considered becoming a Labour MP before embarking on his career as a television playwright.
Potter's career as a playwright began conventionally enough with works like Vote, Vote, Vote for Nigel Barton, a BBC play about a parliamentary candidatecandidate. He took a major step into controversy with Son of Man (1969), starring Colin Blakely, an alternative view of the last days of Jesus Christ, which led to his being accused of blasphemy. Another play, Brimstone and Treacle (1976), was banned for indecency.
Potter continued to make news as well as winning critical acclaim for drama serials such as Pennies from Heaven (1978) — which brought Bob Hoskins into the limelight — and The Singing Detective (1986), which did the same for Michael Gambon. Although he won many awards for his writing, Potter was generally regarded quizzically by the general viewing public. His TV serial, Blackeyes (1989, also a novel), a drama about a fashion model was widely regarded as self-indulgent. Potter's romantic comedy Lipstick on Your Collar (1993) was a return to more conventional themes.
During the early 1960s, Potter began to suffer from an unusual hereditary condition known as as psoriatic arthropathy, affecting the skin and the joints. The rest of his life, Potter was frequently in hospital, sometimes completely unable to move and in great pain. The disease eventually ruined his hands, reducing them to what he called "clubs". He had to learn to write by strapping a pen to his hand.
In February 1994, Potter learned that he had terminal cancer of the pancreas and liver. With typical sardonic humour, he named his cancer Rupert, after Rupert Murdoch, who represented so much that he hated about British society. He continued to care for his wife suffering from the breast cancer that was to kill her, and then he died a week after her from pancreatic cancer.
Shortly before his death, Potter gave a memorable, if uncomfortable to witness, interview to the BBC, in which he described his work and his determination to continue writing until the end. As he sipped on a morphine cocktail, he told interviewer Melvyn Bragg: "My only regret is if I die four pages too soon."
His final two serials, Karaoke, and Cold Lazarus (two related stories, both starring Albert Finney as the same principal character, one set in the present and the other in the future), were aired posthumously in the United Kingdom as part of a rare collaboration between BBC2 and rival Channel 4.
