Dennis Potter

Dennis Potter0:00

Hallo, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a download from the Desert Island Discs archive. This edition may be slightly different from what was actually broadcast, but it is the only version we have. It comes from the British Library's radio collection.

Dennis Potter0:14

The recording didn't contain the guests' eight music choices, so we've rebuilt the original show by using discs from the B B C Gramophone library. For Wright's reasons we've had to shorten the music.

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Full details can be found on the Castaways page on the Desert Island Discs website.

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The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen seventy seven.

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And the presenter was Roy Plumley.

Presenter0:54

On Adazad Island this week is the television playwright Dennis Potter.

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How do you feel about loneliness? Could you endure it? Probably for a while, yes. I I'm not really a very gregarious person. I never have been, except, you know, for brief periods, brief manic periods. And on the whole I've adapted to fairly reclusive circumstances in the past, and I think I I could for a while again.

Presenter1:20

How much does music mean to you? Ha have you any musical skill yourself? I'm not, as my choice will indicate, a particularly musical person. Music means things in a literary way to me. It it has to be a trigger for some event, some memory, some gathering of impressions from the past. And then I can add those extra layers of meaning to it myself. Um I used to tinkle on the piano, and I played in a village brass band in Forest of Dean when I was ten. Yes. What was your instrument? Uh a baritone, which is uh sized down from the euphonium. When when I was uh

Dennis Potter1:50

What was your instrument?

Presenter1:57

Being taught by the conductor as a ten-year-old, he said, just imagine old butt that's got a bit of backee on the tongue and I'm just trying to spit it out. So as a ten-year-old who had had an illicit woodbine, I suppose that was about the closest to musical perfection I ever achieved. What's your first record? My first record is Immortal, Invisible, God Only Wise from memories of Chap or Salem Free Church in my childhood, sung by the Triorkie Male Voice Choir, because although living about eight miles from the border, I therefore hated the Welsh with a passion which even to this day makes me want to amend the Race Relations Act to exclude the Welsh. Nevertheless, I must admit they were like us, in many ways, like us Forrester Dean people.

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And Chappell was the cradle of

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the first set of images, of parables, of an imaginative structure of life which preceded even school, and probably where I learned how to read and the first record will instantly bring back to me Salem Chapel, and all the riches that followed from Salem Chapel.

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Immortal, invisible, God only wise by the Triorky male choir. Now, as you said, Dennis, you were born in the forest of Dean. Your father was a miner. Are you one of a large family? No, I have a sister who's thirteen months younger than I am, and people used to think we were twins. Mhm. Of course you're too young to have known the

Speaker 44:09

Gosh not.

Presenter4:11

The very bad times of the Depression. Was there hardship in your childhood? Not that I knew it as a child, but in retrospect, um it took World War to give my father four weeks' work. You know, I mean I think the first four weeks' work they had was in nineteen forty. So there was always I was born in nineteen thirty five, so there was always uh

Presenter4:31

Some pressure, put it that way. Um but of course in a loving household you're not aware of want in that sense. I never was, no. Were there books in the house?

Dennis Potter4:33

Uh

Presenter4:40

Uh no. Sank his sacred songs and solos. Um there was one uh romance and novel, and there was Red Star and My Weekly, the women's magazines do so. But that that was about the extent of the literature available in the early days.

Dennis Potter4:51

Uh

Presenter4:57

As a schoolboy, what did you want to be?

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I'm told that when I was asked when I was seven what did I want to be, I I used to say uh either a great writer or prime minister. So I must have wanted been aware that there were possibilities and so I end up doing neither, but there you are. Do you remember who suggested that you should work towards a scholarship to a university? Yes, uh a teacher in the uh first year of the sixth form who when he did it he slapped down Plato's Republic in front of me in translation of course and said, Read that. I think you ought to go to Oxford and I went home and said uh

Presenter5:38

mister Amelo thinks I ought to go to Oxford, and the instinctive quick response, which is quite understandable for my mother, is We can't afford it, you can't possibly go there. But I knew that I could.

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Let's break at this point for record number two.

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My second choice is uh

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Brass Band Sons of the Brave Good Brass Band March

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And I've chosen this particularly because it very much brings back to me my father, who died two years ago. And I hadn't heard it except in preparing the choice for this. I wasn't aware of how vividly it would bring him back. Because when he'd had a drink, or when he was in a particularly jovial mood, this and Sladeburn, or a couple of other marches, he would sort of march round the the room doing this, you know, without an instrument, just using his lips, mouth, and humming, and so on.

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It also reminds me, you know, of of leaning in through the door of the band hut, as it was, where the the village band, the Berry Hill Silver Prize band, played.

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And I think that that this record will continually bring back to me affection, warmth, and people that I love.

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Sons of the Brave, played by the G U S Footwear Band National Champions. Well, you did get there a scholarship to New College, Oxford. What did you read? PPE, Politics, Economics, Philosophy.

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Just as you'd done well at school, you you did well in Oxford, you became editor of the Isis. What were your other occupations? The sport, theatre? I was chairman of the Labour Club as well, and I acted a great deal in Ouds and Experimental Theatre Club, and I even persuaded the Labour Club to put on a play in the Oxford Town Hall, which is at the Caucasus Chalk Circle, Bracht.

Dennis Potter8:27

Oxford

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I mean, my tutors pointed out to me a little ad which said, Why not read for a degree in your spare time? So I was fairly fully engaged.

Speaker 48:40

So

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And when you came down, you were in time to tail on to the angry young men, and you wrote an angry book about it all.

Presenter8:52

Yes. Well, I wrote the book in my last year at Oxford because I'd already started writing my first piece was The New Statesman in my second year. And I was already sort of turning in that direction and writing a lot, or trying to, and, you know, with a political orientation or motivation. And having got that first book out of your system, you joined the BBC? I don't know whether I got it out of my system. I think it's still lingering around. Yes. And then I joined the BBC. Yes, whose idea was that? Yours or the BBC? It was the BBC, strangely enough, because I did, while I was at Oxford, Christopher Mayhew did a series on class. And because I'd written stuff in The New Statesman or something, I was picked out in a typical BBC manner as, you know, the minor's son at Oxford, dot, dot, dot, dot, or that, you know, the stereotype.

Dennis Potter9:05

Um

Dennis Potter9:10

Yeah.

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Yeah.

Dennis Potter9:16

Yeah.

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Yes, who

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Be sure

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Nonsense and

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I performed on this uh programme, performed with the usual sort of youthful bravado and mixture of half-truths and aggressions and all that. But strikingly enough to be invited to uh come and have a talk. I had a talk and then I realised, oh, I can join this place, and I couldn't think of what else to do, so I did. Which programmes did you work on? As a general trainee, I went first into radio, Bush House, and all that, so you were thrust in front of a microphone almost straight away, doing little talks about football and I don't know, goodness knows what, uh, to an unknown and probably nonexistent audience. And then uh to Lime Grove and I I worked on briefly on Panorama and on Tonight the Old Tonight and I did a documentary with Tony Le Bignier about the uh Forest of Dean.

Dennis Potter10:22

So

Presenter10:28

Why did you leave the corporation?

Presenter10:30

Because uh I was still writing things and I would be called in front of people saying, you know, you realize you mustn't do this and I thought, Oh my goodness, what do what do they mean I can't do this? And I was aware that I would not be not able to write about politics. And so I I I resigned after a year. To do what? To go to the Daily Herald, which in my innocence I presumed was a socialist newspaper, which is a funny, which is a laugh.

Presenter10:55

You were a feature writer? I was a feature writer for a year, yes. What sort of feature? Just generals, like should barmaids eat their young sort of features. And it was about that time that you became ill? Yes, in nineteen sixty two. I was covering

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Oddly enough, and and God is a very subtle person, the Young Conservatives Conference at the

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friends' meeting house, and realized I couldn't get up from the press table suddenly. And I know I was pretty nauseated by what was going on on the platform, but I didn't realize it had reached my lower limbs. But lo and behold, I suddenly could not walk properly.

Presenter11:33

And that was the beginning of what turned out to be a rather long onslaught. Yes, a a form of arthritis. A psoriatic arthropathy, which is has two stings to the tail, so to speak. One was the arthritis in the joints, and the second, and in many ways the worst, was acute psoriatic lesions all over the skin, in fact reaching at one stage 100%, you know, even to the eyelids and so forth. The first onslaught of that disease didn't stop you fighting a bi-electron? No, I thought I couldn't go into the office, or it soon became evident that I couldn't go into the office. So they asked me to become a television critic, which I did.

Speaker 312:01

The first document.

Presenter12:14

And at the same time I I'd just been selected, just prior to this first attack, as a a Labour candidate in in East Hertfordshire. And I thought, well, if if I'm going to be forced to give up too much, it's going to be so dreadful that I should just, you know, become utterly depressed and

Presenter12:32

beaten. Um so I hung on to the uh candidacy.

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And duly fought the campaign in FOT, I think is the word they always use, in 1964, and found that I couldn't, in fact, do it. And I was also nauseated by it, and I couldn't go back to the office in any capacity, because then the Daily Herald had just metamorphosed into the pre-Murdoch Sun, and they'd asked me to be a leader writer. And I only did it for two weeks, and then the election. And then I found I couldn't go back. That was my last job, you know, and from then on it was like action stations in terms of personal crises and so on.

Dennis Potter13:09

Press Look.

Presenter13:12

Well let's have your third record. What's that? My third record is uh Al Bowlie uh singing with a Luestone Band, You Couldn't Be Cuter, which is uh

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a nice example of that combination. Nineteen thirties music, w to which I have a very complex relationship. I mean, I I like to think I listen to it with an alert and sardonic mind. I don't know whether I do, but I w

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It's the sort of music I play when when I have been depressed or the sort of music I play when I'm working sometimes because it's that kind of easy stuff.

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It's a sugar mouse. Sug sugar mice can remind you of real mice sometimes, and you can actually find in this sort of music some of the things you're looking for.

Speaker 413:54

My Ma will show you an album of me that'll bore you to tear.

Speaker 414:00

And you'll attract all the relatives we have dark for years and years.

Dennis Potter14:04

Yeah.

Speaker 414:06

And what'll they tell me, exactly, what'll they tell me? They'll say you couldn't be nicer, couldn't be sweeter, couldn't be better, couldn't be smarter, couldn't be cuter, baby, than you are.

Dennis Potter14:16

Uh

Dennis Potter14:18

Yeah.

Presenter14:27

You couldn't be cuter, Al Boldy with Lou Stone in his band.

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Well, now you were sick. You were stuck in front of a television screen, being a television critic. Is that when you started writing for television?

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I started really writing for television when I was forced to give up the job altogether. But the the experience of watching television for um Two years nearly, and writing those silly little pieces in a silly little newspaper.

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was such that I, like millions of people no doubt, felt well I can do better than this. That that was the the operative word. And uh because I had had some experience of television, because I'd watched a lot of television and because I believed I mean had almost evangelical notions about the importance of television in in our culture um that seemed to be the place to turn in terms of uh well of making a livelihood, of existing, of keeping uh keeping things going. When was your first play? My first play was uh called The Confidence Course, which is an hour play on BBC.

Dennis Potter15:22

What was your first play?

Presenter15:28

Now, physically, the physical act of writing was pretty fair hell for you, wasn't it? It was difficult, but became less difficult as you get used to the way of holding a pen in a particular way, and

Presenter15:40

It was also so important and such a means of establishing one's own dignity, that you were providing for your family and that you were you were actually functioning properly, that although yes, I mean, clearly it was sometimes painful to actually, you know, dot the I, cross the T and so on, nevertheless that act was so important and so vital that I never really thought of it as a painful act, but as an emancipating act.

Dennis Potter16:05

But as new

Presenter16:07

How many plays have you written now for the box? Oh, grief. Because because it reminds me of things that are gone fore you know, thrown away in some senses. Um it must be about twenty-five original plays.

Dennis Potter16:14

You know.

Presenter16:21

And by original plays you mean one-off plays. You've never got mixed up in.

Dennis Potter16:24

Yeah.

Presenter16:26

Series of thirteen. No, the only generic title. No, no. I I would hate to inherit a group of characters and hand them on. I I would be very tempted to mutilate them before handing them on. Uh the only exception is Casanova, which was, you know, just six that I wrote, and that was almost imposed upon me in a sense. I would rather that it have been a six-hour play, six and a half hours, seven hour, eight-hour play, or whatever it was. But that wasn't and probably still isn't a possible form.

Dennis Potter16:28

No, the generic title.

Presenter16:55

So let's have another record.

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Well the the next one I've chosen is Twelfth Street Rag, especially because I have this particularly strong image of uh of Form IIA at Bowes Grammar School in Cauford, when the teacher left the room for a rather prolonged period, and this seeing this thirteen-year-old startlingly attractive black haired girl.

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cheekly going to the front and to the desk and picking up a twelve inch ruler and beating out with enormous vigour Twelve Street rag at the top of her voice, and uh all the signals, the the sort of uh adolescent sex flaring up, you know, the sight of this this this uh pretty girl doing Twelfth Street rag. I can never hear Twelfth Street rag without being reminded of some of the great joys of life, and I think on my island I would need to think about not just that.

Dennis Potter17:33

BAAP Airing

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Thirteen year old, but of all the women of the world.

Speaker 418:49

Yeah.

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Twelfth Street Rag, Duke Ellington and his orchestra recorded in nineteen thirty one.

Presenter19:02

Right, Dennis. Twenty-five plays. None is an easy play. None features a straightforward story told in a straightforward manner. There is always...

Dennis Potter19:05

There's

Presenter19:12

An an air of fantasy. Yeah, that's possibly the case. I never quite know what a straightforward story in a straightforward manner actually means. You see, the one of the curses of television is it sort of

Presenter19:24

It's naturalism, it its assumption that this is the way to tell stories, that the plays get like the news, plays get like documentaries, documentaries get like plays, and it's such a sort of mishmash on the production belt that I think if television drama original television drama which is perhaps the last place on television where you can actually hear the cadences of the individual voice, the individual imagination, then then it it's it's imperative to find ways of stretching the imagination or reaching the emotions which aren't just this flat naturalism, which is the basic.

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Picture on television.

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And and I I think one's one's got to fragment that. Of course at that time you were very handicapped socially. You were unable to travel very much.

Presenter20:13

Your total life was was encapsulated? Yes, n not quite so much as that sounds. I mean, I was still able to come up to London now and again, and there were sort of remission periods where it was less bad. But with a a good family life, a loving wife, three children, nice house, comfortable.

Presenter20:36

and the whole world on white paper, waiting to be filled in. I think that I I never really thought of that as a as a burden or a as a difficulty in that sense. No.

Presenter20:47

Now in that twenty-five plays you have run into an unusual amount of trouble. Looking down the list, vote vote for Nigel Barton, banned on political grounds. Well delayed on political grounds. Well amended version and transmitted later. Almost Cinderella cancelled.

Dennis Potter20:56

What

Speaker 320:58

Well I'm

Speaker 421:00

Yeah.

Presenter21:04

Son of Man, postponed, but afterwards broadcast. Brimstone and Treacle, recorded, but alas never transmitted. I mean that that is four.

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Now, BBC television on the whole isn't particularly pretty. Wha why have you been over the top?

Presenter21:18

So many times? Um, I don't know whether it's it's over the top or into the middle. Um

Presenter21:23

The reasons differ in each case. The political reasons, you know, obvious. It was a play about a Labour candidate, Nigel Barr in this one. So one could understand the reasons for that. Um but I think if if you're going to be writing plays that are not just

Presenter21:37

Part of the the PAP.

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And you're going to be writing about emotions, beliefs, feelings that are.

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pulled out of you because they're meaningful to you and therefore you presume to others.

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Then it's always possible that this sort of confrontation will will arise. I mean, I was very unhappy about Brimstone and Treacle because I I cast it as, and thought of it as, and worked on it as, a religious parable about the relationship between good and evil. But religion on television is a thing for sugar and uh

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Sunday half hour and a sort of sweet Sunday tea timey sort of thing. Whereas religion to me is it's basic to my response to life now. It's about the pain and the darkness of life as well.

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And it's a great contest in which one I believe

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Has to engage in and with.

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And if this comes out in the plays more and more, and it probably is coming out because it is my main preoccupation, then I wouldn't be totally startled that our wholly secular society should be transposed into a bureaucracy at the BBC which believes that this play will quote disturb people. When we get plays which don't disturb people, it's the time to start worrying.

Presenter23:01

Let's move on to music. Number five. Well, number five is uh Somebody Stole My Gow, Reginald Dixon. Because I was brought to London when I was ten, between V E Day and V J Day, and went to the what was then called the Goldman Cinema in Hammersmith, now called the Oldian, I believe.

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And

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To my astonishment, this great thing rose out of hell for or for where it had come from, and all the lights dipped down, and there was this

Dennis Potter23:27

Uh

Speaker 423:27

Before

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Marvelous thing making this sound and then Tarzan or

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the Bowery Boys, or whatever it was that that followed. Um so I would only have to hear this to have the screen immediately erected on the island, and I would sit back and remember all the Bad B movies of my youth.

Presenter24:45

Reginald Dixon playing Somebody Stole My Girl. You've never written for the theatre, have you? You've adapted a few of your television things. Son of Man and only believe in vote for Nigel Barton. Been done in various places. You have professed a disdain for the theatre. I had professed, yes. I used to profess, yes. Have you given that up? Perhaps because of Brimstone and Treacle, perhaps because I'm forty-two and going through, you know, use your midlife crises about the importance or otherwise of what one is doing.

Speaker 424:51

Yeah.

Dennis Potter24:51

Yeah.

Dennis Potter24:58

You would have preferred

Dennis Potter25:00

I have

Dennis Potter25:01

Yes, I used to profess. Yes.

Presenter25:23

Maybe I'm just more disillusioned than I should be with television. Although I still want to write for television, I I think it gets a bit more difficult, and people are just that little bit more timid. And I've I've I've been commissioned um um by the Oxford Playhouse and by the National Theatre.

Presenter25:42

And I'm responding to that. And they needed to seek me out so that in order that I could say, Oh, well, it was only prejudice after all. So we'll see. And of course it's good news that you're now getting considerable remission from your illness.

Presenter25:56

Oh yes, this is my year of uh miracles in in in terms of my personal uh life. The new cytotoxic drug that I'm taking in a clinical trial has brought me considerable

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Huge, tremendous.

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Emancipating relief. In fact, when I came out of hospital in March, I thought the whole world was.

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Washed, clean, new, shining. It's a marvellous experience to have, you know, to see as though sort of.

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Things had

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been removed from in front of your eyes so that you could actually see what a joyous and gorgeous

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world that we actually do live in.

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Some more music. My next one is It's a Sad Little Song, Sung in a Sad Little Voice, by Elsie Carlyle, back in 1932 at the Mayfair Hotel with the Ambrose band, The Clouds Will Soon Roll By. I find it such a plunge, such a sweetly stupid, silly little song that it actually provokes something approaching genuine emotion in me. And I think I would like to play this, particularly when the light is fading and I'm getting a bit jumpy. I'll play this. I'll play this. Yes.

Speaker 327:06

Somewhere the sun is shining

Speaker 327:10

So, honey, don't you cry.

Speaker 327:14

We'll find a silver lining The clouds will soon roll by

Speaker 327:23

I hear a robin singing

Speaker 327:27

Upon a treat of five

Speaker 327:31

To you and me he's singing The clouds will soon roll by

Presenter27:38

The clouds will soon roll by. Ambrose and his orchestra with L Carlyle. Now, work in progress, Dennis. You have two stage plays to write eventually. There's the adaptation of The Mayor of Casterbridge coming in January in the BBC Two serial. But the one that really engages me is a six-part play in the play for Today Spot, which I'm calling Pennies from Heaven, which is about a song sheet salesman in 1935, or mid-thirties anyway.

Presenter28:11

And I'm using up s some of these peculiar obsessions that I have with that music.

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and trying to see what charge there is in it that I can use.

Presenter28:21

And you're back to being a television critic on a Sunday paper. Yeah. And your fellow television dramatists aren't particularly happy about it. Well, some of them. Well, some of them. I can see their point, because ethically, I mean, you as a playwright have to knock the work of your colleagues and rivals if you don't like it. And praise it if I do like it. Oh, yes, of course. But is this sort of ethically justifiable?

Dennis Potter28:24

Uh

Speaker 428:24

Yeah.

Speaker 428:28

Well some of them.

Speaker 428:40

Yeah.

Dennis Potter28:40

Yeah.

Presenter28:45

Oh, I don't see that it is.

Presenter28:48

a problem. It's it's a it's a problem if people think it a problem and therefore that, you know, in a sense therefore it is a problem. But there's a curious assumption that criticism should be for the performer or for the writer or for the production staff. It isn't. It should be for the reader and the viewer.

Presenter29:04

And if you respond as honestly as you can.

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And if you have things that you need and you think need saying about television in general, and about all categories of programmes.

Presenter29:14

Then then I don't see the conflict.

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I think the same writers who object.

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If it had so happened that I said, you know, this is a masterpiece by X, or an absolutely stunning, brilliant eye-opener from Y, they would have said, you know, you're a damn good critic

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Another record.

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Combination of alboli singing Lewestone Band, a Lewestone Band at its most bouncy and bright in and a song that I think is very funny and will make me simper as I'm cowering in whatever hole it is that I end up on this this island. E D was a lady.

Speaker 430:00

Oh, Edie was a lady. Edie was a lady. All her friends were shady. All her mouth was shady. Oh, Edie had clowns.

Speaker 430:11

With a capital Kiddie, Edie was a lady. Though her life was merry, she had sandwich berries and Edie did things in a ladylike way.

Presenter30:30

Lewestone in his band Al Boley and Nat Canela, Edie was a lady.

Presenter30:35

And your last disc, what have you saved till the end?

Presenter30:38

I've saved until the end Rose is a Piketty.

Presenter30:41

A song, if sung in a particular way, which always pours out of me things that are so deep that you can't express them. And I found out why much later when my mother told me that in fact she used to sing this to me when I was very small.

Speaker 431:08

Me to the heart.

Speaker 431:10

Oh for the sin or red you

Speaker 431:17

Rose as our flow.

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Gracie Field singing Roses of Picardy.

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If you could take just one disk and not eight.

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Which would it be?

Presenter31:34

I think it would have to be between Sons of the Brave and Roses of Piketty. In a sentence, it's almost like having to choose between my mother and my father. But uh.

Presenter31:42

I think the brass band thing.

Presenter31:46

And we allow you to take one luxury, one thing of no practical use, must be inanimate.

Presenter31:51

Well I'd like to take a painting. It's it's one that I'd seen in reproduction and I saw in reality in the Museum of Modern Art in New York in September. It's a painting by Edward Hopper called Gas, or we'd say petrol. Again it's that time when the light is fading and there are three lit up red petrol pumps. The electric light has been switched on. This was painted in nineteen forty. The electric light's switched on in the gas station and the light splashes across the gloom, across some brown gr grass and a lonely country road and s to some dark green trees. And there's this lone balding attendant just sort of locking up, seeing to the pumps. And it's extremely

Presenter32:35

poignant and

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faintly disturbing and yet also reassuring.

Presenter32:41

image and I would I think I could spend a very great deal of time looking at that. And one book apart from The Bible and Shakespeare, which are already on the island, and we put the bar up on big encyclopedias. Yes, well I have no hesitation in choosing uh the best possible collection of Hazlitt's essays. They are so wide and he's so brilliant and so provocative still.

Presenter33:05

that they would never cease to feed me.

Presenter33:08

Hasnitz Essays. And thank you, Dennis Potter, for letting us hear your Desert Island discs. Thank you. I enjoyed it even though I summoned up Dusk too many times. Goodbye, everyone.

Dennis Potter33:26

You've been listening to a download from the Desert Island Discs archive.

Dennis Potter33:30

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