Dennis Potter

Speaker 10:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive. For rights reasons we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen eighty eight, and the presenter was Michael Parkinson.

Presenter0:30

In any self-respecting history of drama on British television, R. Castaway would emerge as the dominant figure. From the very beginning in the sixties when he wrote Vote, Vote, Vote for Nigel Barton, through the seventies with Blue Remembered Hills and Pennies from Heaven, to the present and the singing detective, he showed himself to be a writer of unique imagination and originality. He is Dennis Potter. Dennis, w would you welcome this solitary life, do you think, on the Desert Island? Probably up to

Dennis Potter0:56

Point. I do have a very reclusive temperament which occasionally bursts out. You know, reclusiveness and shyness are not the same thing, fortunately, but

Dennis Potter1:05

I like I always have liked being

Dennis Potter1:08

on my own for long periods. It's sometimes difficult to arrange in marriage and and things but the concept of being on my own is is attractive to me.

Speaker 11:11

I heard

Presenter1:12

Ready?

Presenter1:17

No, you're a practical man. I mean so

Dennis Potter1:18

So

Dennis Potter1:19

Afraid not. But then there wouldn't be a file of facts there, would there? And there wouldn't be a sort of ring circuit. I wouldn't have to change plugs and things. I'd just sit under a tree and contemplate my forthcoming

Presenter1:30

Yeah.

Dennis Potter1:30

See?

Dennis Potter1:31

Uh

Presenter1:31

And how much of a solace would music be in this situation? Indeed, I I mean has music been a solace in your life or an inspiration in your life? Solice

Dennis Potter1:38

sound an inspiration, but particular kinds of music. Um

Dennis Potter1:44

It can be a chariot, you know, it can take you

Dennis Potter1:47

You can fly with music, and particularly in in dr in if you're writing a a play or something, you can use music on the edge of words, on the edge of the character's mind.

Dennis Potter1:58

And you know that other people are sharing, if not exactly the same emotion, a roughly similar one.

Dennis Potter2:04

It can be no matter how sugary, syncopated, banal, or cheap, it can be extraordinarily powerful.

Presenter2:12

Then what's about the first choice of record, then? What does that remind you of? Or what emotion does that provoke? Basically, I suppose half

Dennis Potter2:18

Malicious one. I I'm choosing um Tommy Dorsey Band's version of I'm Getting Sentimental Over You and I'm choosing it partly for a sentimental reason in that it was recorded nineteen thirty five, year of my birth. And it's something I've heard on and off, on and off, almost sometimes at the corner of your mind, sometimes when I'm ill I play it.

Dennis Potter2:39

I threaten people that I want to play it at my funeral.

Dennis Potter2:43

Because the the one thing about dying is if the only if if only you could observe their reactions and I want them to think, oh, you know, and start crying, you know, they won't, they'll probably start laughing. But it's that mixture of of uh s force emotion and real emotion that this very popular piece conveys.

Presenter3:31

I'm getting sentimental over you, Tommy Dorsey and his orchestra.

Presenter3:35

Dennis Podo, let let's talk about your background for a bit. You were in fact the son of a miner, weren't you? Yes.

Dennis Potter3:39

And uh dad worked at the at the coal face. Of course this was also during the war when they were also drafted in Bevin boys and all that, but the

Dennis Potter3:48

That the

Dennis Potter3:49

The combined atmosphere and pressure of uh war and the coal mines and the uh

Dennis Potter3:57

The whole culture seemed so strongly sure of itself in an odd protective sort of way, almost suffocatingly close, too close for me at times.

Dennis Potter4:08

And then that's all changed since. But then it was very much a culture of the the mines, rugby football, brass bands and the chapels. And every village had one or two or three chapels.

Presenter4:20

Uh Was there any suggestion that I mean the tradition always in the pit community was that the son followed father down the the pit, as they'd done for generations?

Dennis Potter4:28

I think it was an assumption that you made, certainly you made as a child, you made that assumption that and every father would s say, I think to every son.

Dennis Potter4:36

whatever else I do, you're not going down there. And of course this but that was kind of bravado against the implacable economic facts of the time, that you just simply assumed that that's where your path lay. So why didn't you?

Dennis Potter4:52

Because of examinations accident being clever.

Dennis Potter4:56

Thinking that life was about passing exams, passing eleven plus, grammar school.

Dennis Potter5:01

And gradually you're pulled away, and weaned away, and taught far too soon.

Dennis Potter5:08

In a sense, no teacher ever says to you, scorn your background, of course not. But gradually you start juggling in your mind very conflicting feelings and guilts can very quickly creep in into the gap between. And because you're so young and because you think that passing exams is is is lifeblood of everything, and that in turn means that other values are being, as it were, held up like a flag for you to follow.

Dennis Potter5:39

Inevitably there comes the time, particularly in when you're really conscious of yourself at say twelve, thirteen.

Dennis Potter5:47

when you start willy-nilly, falsely, stupidly, arrogantly judging your background, and then it takes you a long time to come fully

Dennis Potter5:57

back to it and see not only what you gained by this process of education and so on, but what you lost as well.

Dennis Potter6:04

Another choice of record, please, Dennis.

Dennis Potter6:06

Well, I just thought I would choose one of the uh hymns that we used to bellow out as boys at uh Salem Chapel. I would have

Dennis Potter6:13

I have very mixed feelings about that too, but you know, up the hill on a Sunday twice or sometimes three times the day to the chapel.

Dennis Potter6:21

And some of the more evangelical, this is so-called free church, where the uh the preacher would also be a working man.

Dennis Potter6:28

And there's something which I would hate ever

Dennis Potter6:32

to totally trample on about the

Dennis Potter6:35

the vividness of the the stories and the images and the concepts of behaviour that you learnt there in that very simple stone box, as it were.

Dennis Potter6:47

that I still kind of half cherish and half frightened by. And so the perhaps the most stirring and evangelical of all those hymns I would choose to remind, I'm plunged straight back, looking at the tap at the woven banner behind the pulpit of Onward Christian Soldiers.

Speaker 27:04

For impeach and sword

Speaker 27:07

More team.

Presenter8:02

Did you um ever manage uh to to communicate properly with your father?

Presenter8:06

Uh

Dennis Potter8:10

He died in ni in nineteen seventy five and I s can still feel you know, I still feel the relationship is going on.

Dennis Potter8:16

you know, I still grieve about it, uh, and him.

Speaker 18:19

Yeah.

Dennis Potter8:20

I am

Dennis Potter8:21

He was an incredibly gentleman. He would start I would be writing, saying.

Dennis Potter8:26

He would come and he would stand in the jamb of the door and lean against say in his forest teena and say, Is that all right, Obat?

Dennis Potter8:33

That used to both please and sometimes if I would try I say, Yes, Dad, I'm just trying to get on with that No, but you're sure you're all right, Obad. Yes, Dad, thanks, thanks very much, you know.

Dennis Potter8:43

And of course if I could only say

Dennis Potter8:46

Well, everyone everyone who grieves says that, if I could only say.

Dennis Potter8:53

Another choice of record, please.

Dennis Potter8:56

I'd like to choose

Dennis Potter8:58

My happiness, which was uh I d I think I don't know whether they ever said the phrase top of the charts in nineteen forty eight, but it was very lugubrious.

Dennis Potter9:07

The Pied Pipers. And whenever I'm tempted to say I wish I was very much younger again, I think of being thirteen, sitting in a

Dennis Potter9:17

Sheltered bus stop in Cinderford in the Forest of Dean, watching this young man whistling my happiness. So lugubrious and I think, is that what it's all is that what sex and love? Is that what it's all about? And if you listen to it, oh God, it still tugs at you and it still makes you feel, Oh, isn't it? Have I combed my hair, have I got a pimple? You know, all that.

Speaker 29:38

Evening shadows make me

Speaker 29:44

When each weary day is through

Speaker 29:50

How I long to be with you.

Speaker 29:54

Yeah.

Speaker 29:56

Why happy nests?

Speaker 210:02

Every day I rare.

Presenter10:06

My happiness, the Pied Pipers. Nothing much to get excited about there was the dinner.

Dennis Potter10:09

No, except in your own head if you were thirteen. I see I suppose it's premasturbation music.

Presenter10:16

Let's go back to the to the point where you you joined the BBC and journalism was in fact uh your your first love, quite obviously. And then into politics, you stood as a Labour candidate, didn't you? Was that a a really serious effort to to change the world?

Speaker 210:23

Uh

Dennis Potter10:23

Yeah.

Dennis Potter10:26

And see.

Dennis Potter10:29

Uh I think I'd written my first book in my last year at Oxford and it was one of those a young man looks at England sort of things and it was called The Glittering Coffin, the glittering coffin being England, as it were.

Dennis Potter10:43

And on the first page of which I said my ambition was to be a Labour Member of Parliament. I didn't actually say my ambition was to be a Labour Cabinet Minister or even Labour Prime Minister, but of course it was. But, you know, so already being political and discreetly modifying the public statement of ambition, like they all do.

Dennis Potter11:01

And yes, I w I do and I still feel that. I still feel that the world needs a change and that England or Britain I should say

Dennis Potter11:10

Needs.

Dennis Potter11:12

a different way of looking at itself.

Dennis Potter11:14

But I found it temperamentally that I'm

Dennis Potter11:18

First of all, by the time I f uh stood in the election, I was already ill. I lost my job because as a result of canvassing, I was then on the the Daily Herald was transmuting into the fairly decent pre Murdoch son.

Dennis Potter11:33

And uh the eff the physical effort of the election meant that I couldn't go back to the office, so they gave me three months' money and I decided, well, you know, I got two young kids, what the hell am I going to do?

Dennis Potter11:45

I couldn't write another political book because you sell about seventy-four copies or something.

Dennis Potter11:49

And I was sort of midway through a a novel or I'd been playing with the idea. I mean, I've always wanted to write, I suppose. And I turned it into a television play.

Dennis Potter12:00

uh as the quickest means of uh ensuring that

Dennis Potter12:04

Do you know that I could survive? Yes. And then. My political agent at the time said, My God He said, You're the first candidate I've had who's used his old speeches and turned them into a play which

Presenter12:14

Which is about natural parts. But so having done that, man, that was a matter of expediency that you wrote your first play for television, you know these must.

Dennis Potter12:14

It's something nice about it.

Dennis Potter12:21

Because I honestly I th I thought a novel was slower and less difficult than than uh but the the television was more immediate in terms of um the financial need that I then had. But I television to me was the the peak place. Maybe this the possibilities of a common culture can be laughed out, you know, scornfully laughed out of court. But I still had I less so now because experience and multiplicity of

Dennis Potter12:52

technological developments, the way our whole culture is going makes it even more untenable to hold to the idea of a common culture. But still the the television, the way it is reaching people, the way it's it's not millions of people, but series of two people, two, three, four

Speaker 113:06

Uh

Dennis Potter13:11

multiplied enormously. And that that all the different kinds of age, education, class can be responding to the same order of thing, whereas in a print culture

Dennis Potter13:24

Clearly, you you either read the Times or the Independent or the Financial Times or the Sun, the Star, the Mirror. That seems it's one of those terrible divides, gaps, because

Dennis Potter13:35

Of our appalling educational system, our appalling the way our press has fallen into the hands of these merchants.

Dennis Potter13:42

means that we're continually attempting to create a kind of underclass in in taste, education, values. And then we say, you know, the British abroad, you know, the you see on a ferry some guy with a union jack round his shoulders vomiting into the sea, sounding like a Yobs, absolutely behaving like a Cretan. I say, well there, you know, you cast your bread on the waters, it's coming back to you.

Dennis Potter14:06

Another choice of record, please.

Dennis Potter14:08

I'd like to choose while I'm on this island, I'd I'd like to think of something that did show that you can be complex and you can involve the entire range of your emotions in in a television drama, which I which I I s I tried to do.

Dennis Potter14:23

with the singing detective and the

Dennis Potter14:26

The title theme of the Singing Detective is Max Harris and his trio, which is actually Peg on my heart.

Dennis Potter14:33

just brings the tensions and difficulties of sitting down at the first episode and wondering what the hell people are going to make of it and then finding that they actually

Dennis Potter14:43

do follow you. They they can, and they're not to be underestimated.

Presenter15:18

Peg of my heart, Max Harris and his trio, reminded there of the singing detective.

Presenter15:23

I that of course was I suppose the most uh direct depiction uh Dennis that people would have seen of of your illness because uh Michael Gambon who played Marlowe in that of course is suffering from the same

Speaker 115:29

The majority of the

Presenter15:34

Illness at human, which is called psoriasis in the head.

Dennis Potter15:34

Good.

Dennis Potter15:37

Yeah.

Dennis Potter15:37

Radicarthropathy, which involves both arthritis and psoriasis, is two functions of the same ailment, as it were.

Presenter15:45

I I suppose most people who do saw that uh would would remember the the the sort of physical condition of Gambon in that. I mean, how much was that a depiction of of the reality?

Dennis Potter15:55

An understatement of the

Dennis Potter15:59

extremity of when it's at its full peak.

Dennis Potter16:02

It reached its full peak with me finally in nineteen seventy two, and that's when my hands collapsed and and everything sort of went wrong, and it was months at a pitch.

Dennis Potter16:13

Like in episode one of The Singing Detective, because you're one hundred percent psoriatic and you can't move your joints either.

Dennis Potter16:21

And you lose the skin being an important monitoring or an important function of temperature and it just you just lose control of all that and you start to mildly and sometimes not so mildly hallucinate and uh you can't put a pin anywhere on your body that isn't covered with these h like sort of roof tiles of of skin because it's dividing so fast and

Dennis Potter16:45

the the joints are I mean, I couldn't sit up, I could just about move my left arm. It was like that. Then, of course, the new generations of drugs and the

Dennis Potter16:55

Then I was put onto mesotrexate, the cytotoxic drugs, and now it's controlled six months on, three months off as it were. And I hope that uh this summer I had another gambon like attack of it through

Dennis Potter17:10

May, June, July.

Dennis Potter17:12

And then I'm released into because it's so cyclical, I'm released again under uh uh the daily drug I'm take.

Dennis Potter17:19

into virtually normal apart from the damage has been done to the joints.

Dennis Potter17:25

So it is a con it's not curable, therefore it is a continuing. It is a fact of my life since the age of twenty six. So it's it's it's half my entire life, literally.

Dennis Potter17:35

and it's most of my working life, and therefore it's something

Dennis Potter17:40

Obviously I'd be a fool if I did not attend to it, and which I do, and since there is a relationship between

Dennis Potter17:47

illness and

Dennis Potter17:49

personality and between the way you think about yourself and the way you react to stress and crisis. It has taken things away from me clearly, but it's also given me that concentration upon

Dennis Potter18:03

what it was that is actually going on, what what it is to sort of drop out of life, which it seemed to be that I was doing, you know, all political ambitions and public ambitions had to go obviously by the board, but that was a good thing.

Presenter18:17

Yeah.

Dennis Potter18:18

Yeah.

Presenter18:18

Yes, you once said actually somewhere I read that you said perhaps we ought to have hospitals for people who are well.

Presenter18:24

Is this something about you that you're talking about?

Dennis Potter18:25

It's that that sent you because you could see them your fellow patients when they were visiting ours and people come in with the real world and smell of the real world on their feet and so on. Often, although they're looking forward to it, there's always a kind of tension about visiting because the preoccupations of the patient sometimes don't gel with the outside world. And many of those people never had a chance, never been had a chance to be

Dennis Potter18:51

To concentrate upon the shape of their own lives. You know, they've been at work and they've got mortgages, kids, marriages.

Dennis Potter18:58

Toil

Dennis Potter18:59

activity, habit, or

Dennis Potter19:02

making you think that what you are is what is defined by other people, whereas we're all sovereign, separate human beings and most of the time most of life is telling us we're not.

Dennis Potter19:13

It's the same with war or um any personal crisis. People

Dennis Potter19:19

Find in the first case, fortunately, that they're far more heroic than they ever give themselves credit for, but secondly.

Dennis Potter19:26

they can begin to assemble something like

Dennis Potter19:30

a perception of the shape of their their own lives. And that really was the model for the singing detective, why detective stories are interesting, because they are all clues about assembling. And the point Marlowe began

Dennis Potter19:47

totally sort of out of it and full of hate and scorn and lacerating himself and before he could even start to get better or

Dennis Potter19:57

even contemplate walking away from the bed, he had to readdress himself, and that's what happens in illness.

Dennis Potter20:04

Another choice of record, please.

Dennis Potter20:06

I'd like to uh choose something, you know, just a very because I just love the sound of it and it the gentleness of uh this blues number, uh strolling or walking the blues by uh Jack Dupret, Champion Jack Dupret.

Speaker 220:32

Man, slow down, don't walk so fast.

Speaker 220:39

All you got to do is take your time. We'll get that.

Speaker 220:45

Stay in the road.

Speaker 220:50

I don't blame the people from saying walk in the blue.

Speaker 220:54

Walking the blues.

Speaker 220:56

Cause this is it, boy.

Speaker 221:00

Now I think I'm gonna relax myself.

Speaker 221:07

Where you relax

Speaker 221:10

Now watch this.

Speaker 221:16

Boy, it's a hot day today.

Presenter21:19

Walk in the blues champion Jack Dupre

Presenter21:23

Dennis Poda, what are you what are you working on at present? I mean, I want you to look forward to something again as exciting as uh

Dennis Potter21:28

Well, I'm just about to plunge into a a Hollywood movie, so I don't know whether it'll ever get actually made. So, I better not talk too much about it, but it does involve the the uh

Dennis Potter21:38

Opera and uh

Dennis Potter21:40

I would like to to um

Dennis Potter21:43

choose a bit from Der Freischutz, the uh the Wolf's Glen, which is grand opera at its most crazy, you know, the uh blast oaks, thunderstorms.

Dennis Potter21:52

Cataracts, owl with red eyes, voices, spirit voices singing about moon milk on the grass, spiders' web with blood o'ercast

Dennis Potter22:02

Translations of which can the the audience even now is frequently reduced to rather embarrassed giggles about the sort of excess of Durfry Schultz, which is about huntsmen.

Dennis Potter22:13

First Victorian translation, The Hero says to the villain.

Dennis Potter22:17

Whence gottest thou such stupendous balls?

Dennis Potter22:21

And of course even a Victorian audience could not maintain its propriety under such provocation.

Dennis Potter22:27

Is that the section we're going to hear now? Uh no, not quite, but this is the Worf's Glen, which is real opera at its most excessive.

Speaker 222:35

We are tasked to hear.

Speaker 223:21

SOME BLEAN!

Speaker 223:24

Here, big each

Presenter23:33

That was part of the Wolfs learn from Weber's Der Freischutz, a performance conducted by Raphael Kubelik.

Presenter23:39

Dennis Boda, you mentioned uh the uh working in America in in Hollywood. You you went over there and you did uh the Screenplay Pennies from Devon uh and also you did uh

Speaker 123:47

Yeah, but

Presenter23:49

Gocky Park as well. Was it a a pleasant experience? I asked this because I can't imagine you getting on with some of those Hollywood moguls.

Presenter23:58

It was it was awesome.

Dennis Potter23:58

sorts of experiences all rolled up into into one and

Dennis Potter24:03

You do learn a lot and it because it's alien and you feel alien, I or at least I do, and you know, walking along.

Dennis Potter24:12

Those streets where no one walks, as it were and

Dennis Potter24:17

It's easy to be

Dennis Potter24:19

condescending about that place. But it does have tremendous energy and it does make you because there it is ultra capitalism, as it were, it does make you focus on what it is, which little corner of the supermarket they're dealing with. And they deal with it in those terms. And of course you feel sometimes entirely humiliated or indignant or angry or amused or whatever, a whole mix of emotions. But it it did me good and it affected my subsequent work.

Dennis Potter24:48

Um

Presenter24:49

Wait.

Dennis Potter24:49

It just made me more alert about the whole process of what the whole process of what they would say with you know communicating with an audience. They they go too far and deal in manipulation of feelings uh and drain meaning out of it far too often. But that discipline of the grammar of you know making the point effectively, swiftly, moving on, gathering up your forces for the next scene and so on. Like if you're in any doubt about uh the hero, they say, uh well go where the money is. I say pardon, I say, Well, you know, you go with the man who paid the money, i.e. the star, you know. You can easily parody it and yet there is effectiveness there, which um I'm gonna just be tangling with again and we'll see how wounded I get.

Presenter25:35

Yeah.

Dennis Potter25:35

Uh

Presenter25:35

Because one of the things about it is I believe that I'm right in saying that that when you do something like the scene detective for the BBC, that I mean you you have more or less the control over what appears on the screen.

Presenter25:45

I can't imagine MGM say giving you that kind of

Dennis Potter25:47

Or then

Dennis Potter25:48

to a a director, you know, they they there's no question that he who pays the piper, you know, does call a very uh ruthless tune.

Presenter25:50

Hello.

Dennis Potter25:57

But d d dealing with all of that is a what they would say a learning curve, you know. And you're on that curve and you're either sliding down so fast you don't know what the hell has hit you or you're sort of crawling up it by your fingernails.

Dennis Potter26:12

Um I couldn't possibly go on my island without at least one Duke Ellington and I moved in Dico, which is

Dennis Potter26:19

Beautiful.

Speaker 226:20

Mm-hmm.

Speaker 226:26

Yeah.

Speaker 226:28

Beep beef beef.

Speaker 227:04

Do we do

Presenter27:20

You cannot turn her mood indigo. Your latest novel is called Black Eyes. And again, it's the detective genre, isn't it?

Dennis Potter27:24

Black guys, yeah.

Dennis Potter27:27

It's just sort of playing with that. It's Black Eyes is the name of a fashion model.

Dennis Potter27:32

And uh she appears in a a novel written by a a seventy seven year old fraud, literary fraud, with a booming voice and uh uh rather unsavoury, eccentric habits. But he's actually based that story upon his niece, who is absolutely furious and is trying to d to destructure, as it were, his his novel, which uh in uh the the detective has to be the reader. There is a sort of a solution, but

Presenter28:03

But you have to deliver it up to yourself. But a novel again, that's the third novel you've written in your career. Uh two you've written in in in sequence. Does it mean that you're enough f favoring this kind of uh

Dennis Potter28:13

No, actually the real rea I did that was I started it I wrote it between Boxing Day and Saint Valentine's Day last year, obviously, uh because the singing detective had just finished and I felt genuinely threatened by the singing detective. I went closer than I intended to to some of my own

Dennis Potter28:33

if not actual experiences, feelings and emotions, and that's very dangerous. And I thought I can't write

Dennis Potter28:40

I can't put one exterior, Kensington Gardens day, I will start describing.

Dennis Potter28:46

That that's the the opening of the of the novel with a a body in the round pond. I'll start putting it into prose. Really

Dennis Potter28:55

to make sure I can still write, you know. And it then it came like a dream and uh I just kept at it and there it was. But it w it was really to escape the singing detective more than anything else. Final choice of record, please. Has to be Smoke Gets In Your Eyes, which I arbitrarily decided some thirty years ago should be our song, i. e. Margaret, my wife and myself, and my first date with her.

Dennis Potter29:18

when I was con you know, left arm as it were creeping round her shoulder and seeing how far down the other arm it could go, cigarette as usual in the other hand, and she had this these luminous green eyes and they swiveled uh at me at my cigarette smoke and

Dennis Potter29:34

She was obviously irritated by it and I decided there and then uh I didn't have my glasses on at the synagogue because I did I was scared of not looking my best, so I couldn't actually see much of the film and I was concentrating upon her and I thought like a young fool in a way, and yet I'm glad I did think it but we've got to have a song and it's smoke gets in your eyes.

Presenter30:25

Smoke gets in your eyes, Paul Whiteman and his orchestra. Dennis Porter, you know, on your desert island, you've got to imagine that uh you have these eight records for company, tidal wave comes along, seven are wiped away, you're left with one, which should it be.

Dennis Potter30:39

Well, I think I probably need uh an incentive to really try to get off. And I think if I were left with um my happiness.

Dennis Potter30:47

lugubriously churning out day after day, I think I would get I would probably get off. What about the book? Assume you've got the works of Shakespeare and the Bible there. What would be the book? I'll choose Spycatcher.

Presenter30:55

Yeah.

Dennis Potter30:59

Because if if I do, if my happiness doesn't drive me either crazy or into the sea, then a satirite helicopter will soon hover overhead and lift me off.

Dennis Potter31:09

I'd like a read uh to something I never had.

Dennis Potter31:14

I would like to have is a a really good train set, you know, winding all the way around the island with stations and signal boxes, everything. That would that would be very pleasing. Dennis Porter, thank you very much indeed. Thank you.

Speaker 131:34

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.