Potter Matters - News

Where is that tree?

8/8/2024

It's one of the many iconic images of The Singing Detective (1986) - young Philip Marlow in the branches of an oak tree; long shot slowly zooming in; then Philip directly addressing us the viewer: "When I grow up, I be going to be - a detective". John Belcher was engaged by the producers to act as a location scout and fixer for location filming in the Forest of Dean for Potter’s latest BBC drama serial. The scenes with Philip up the tree were originally intended to be shot at Devil's Chapel near Bream. Part of the Bledisloe estate it is an atmospheric woodland atop scowle holes - the local term for the remains of ancient iron-ore excavations & erosions. It’s mysterious dips, ‘potholes’ and their history inspired poet F W Harvey to write a poem of the same name, and was the site of music and performance events in the 1930’s organised by Harvey (upwards of 2,000 people attending). In 1986 it was not an easy site to access for a film crew, and with deep holes and ravines concealed by bracken and ferns was a potentially dangerous. So instead John suggested Nagshead enclosure near Parkend. Today it is an RSPB nature reserve. What of that tree - nearly 40years later could it be identified? On a warm and wet summer's morning a trip with John to Nagshead brought back memories of the shoot. A screengrab helped - that strong perpendicular branch, the tree was so tick etc. But how much does an oak tree change in 40 years? How much has grown up around it, changes in access to light shaping its branches. There were plenty of candidates - including some fine fallen veterans, their carcass left as a habitat and to rot down as feed for the next generation of trees. We didn't find the tree - but knowing that's where those scenes were filmed brought the challenges of location filming into sharper focus. You can hear John recalling his role in the production, and hear Lyndon Davies' recollections of filming 'up the tree' on this site - just click the Digital Stories tab at the top of this page.

"Mr Potter's Beast"

8/7/2024

In 1968 Dennis Potter was already a controversial figure in his native Forest of Dean when for his next play he took as inspiration a notorious local event: 'the killing of the bears'. In 1889 four Frenchmen touring the district with their dancing bears were attacked by a mob prompted by a false rumour that a local child had been killed by one of their bears. The men were badly beaten and both bears were killed - a source of disgrace for the Forest, and controversy to this day as to which community was responsible. Such was the potency of this dark moment in Forest history that reaction against Potter’s choice of subject prompted a slew of letters to the local newspapers even before filming had started. This correspondence provides a fascinating insight into the Forest community’s relationship with the events of (then) eighty years before, but even more so with Potter himself. Delving into the production and local reception of Dennis Potter’s television play A Beast with Two Backs (1968) as played out through the pages of the local Forest newspapers, this talk by Dr Jason Griffiths will address the relationship at the time between Potter and this particular audience, how he engaged with it through his own correspondence, and will question what impact this had on him and his writing.

FOREST CINEMA TO SCREEN POTTER MASTERPIECE

5/26/2024

Dennis Potter passed away thirty years ago this June, and University of Gloucestershire's Reading the Forest in partnership with The Palace Cinema and Dean Heritage Centre is marking the anniversary with a unique marathon screening of one of his most popular and ground breaking serial dramas, The Singing Detective on Sunday 9th June 2024.

Tickets to the screening can be pre-booked here: https://cinderpal.com/cinderford/soon/

The event is the result of the University’s longstanding partnership with the Dean Heritage Centre that saw the Forest museum secure Potter's literary papers to set up the Dennis Potter Archive and permanent exhibition. Researchers and students at the University worked with the museum on setting up and cataloguing the collection, and on putting together the exhibition including producing the Dennis Potter Audio trail. Dr Hannah Grist, who wrote her Phd thesis at the University about the collection, later co-authored a ground-breaking book with Professor Joanne Garde-Hansen about the relationship between Potter’s fans, memory, and the archive.

Ongoing work with the museum has produced several events and exhibitions highlighting how Potter frequently set and filmed elements of his work in his native Forest of Dean, including The Singing Detective. Large parts of the drama were filmed in the Forest, and as with his other locally filmed works, local people were employed as extras. He was a hugely important figure in the development of British television, but he never forgot the people and places where he grew up.

The screening is taking place at The Palace Cinema in Cinderford. “We’ve worked with the University before, and are thrilled to be hosting this event”, says owner Andy Lougher. The cinema, built in 1910 is one of the oldest purpose-built cinemas still operating in Britain, and Potter himself would have known it as a youngster. The audience is being encouraged to come dressed as characters in the drama – detectives, spivs, doctors, nurses, patients, or in 1940s period clothing.

The screening will be introduced (via video) by world renowned Potter expert and author Professor John Cook of Glasgow Caledonian University, a long-standing friend and consultant to the Potter Archive. John’s own research in the archive saw him author a recent paper demonstrating how Potter drew on several of his longstanding themes and ideas in his writing of The Singing Detective. Those attending the screening will also get to see some of the unique artefacts relating to the drama that are held by the Dennis Potter Archive.

Professore Cook's paper can be accessed for free here:
chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://researchonline.gcu.ac.uk/files/72336635/Cook_J._R._2022_The_Country_Boy.pdf

News of June 2024 event in the Forest of Dean coming soon...Am I right?

5/10/2024

Lost Radio Play

3/18/2024

Under the heading 'Hidden Treasures' the BBC has announced that it will be broadcasting a forgotten radio play by Dennis Potter. Traitor was first broadcast in May 1981. The play is Potter's radio version of his Play For Today of the same name broadcast on BBC 1 television in 1971. The play centres around the visit by Western journalists to interview Soviet double agent Adrian Harris in Moscow:

"Harris believes in both Communism and Englishness, believing himself to have betrayed his class, but not his country. The press find these beliefs incompatible, and want to find out why he became a ‘traitor’. Harris is plagued by anxieties over both his actions and his childhood history".

The TV play featured an acclaimed performance by John Le Mesurier as Harris, whilst in the radio play the same part is played by Denholm Elliott. At the time of the first broadcast Potter was asked if he was obsessed with the theme of betrayal:

"I think...a feeling of betrayal...is almost part of our metabolism. I mean, we have at one stage...our ideals...and then you go into jobs, you compromise, you get sick because you can't think too personally about exactly what it is you are trampling underfoot, and you write, buy food, occupy a big house, take a big mortgage, all the things that I'm doing"

In 'Dennis Potter, the authorised biography', by Humphrey Carpenter, 1998, p261

You can hear Traitor on BBC Radio 4, 2.15pm, Monday 25th March.

Alison's Forest Mix Up

4/11/2023

In a recent interview for The Guardian (30th March 2023) Alison Steadman recalled filming of The Singing Detective (1986). The series, which was a tour de force, featured Potter's by then trade mark 'sing and dance' routines with actors lip synching to popular songs of the 1930s and 40s, and multiple intersecting story lines. Steadman played Mrs Marlow, mother of the young Phillip, who would become the author of hard boiled detective stories including The Singing Detective. Steadman, and co-stars Patrick Malahide and Jim Carter are well remembered in the village of Berry Hill where they relaxed with local extras in between scenes. In the scene that Steadman recalls, young Phillip witnesses his mother's extra marital liaison amongst the ferns with family friend Mark Binney (Malahide). The scene became notorious, not least because legal action was taken against Mary Whitehouse for suggesting it was a scene the young Potter had himself in reality witnessed. In the recent interview, and unfortunately making the headline quote for it, Steadman remembered filming the scene in the 'New Forest'. John Belcher worked with location manager Mike Darbon, helping to find suitable Forest locations for filming, and confirms that no, it was most definitely not filmed in the New Forest, but indeed in the Forest of Dean. With your prolific, brilliant career, and your fantastic performances in Dennis Potter's work - we forgive you Alison!

"Singing Dick" back on TV

12/1/2022

The Singing Detective is back on TV, launching with a triple bill last night on BBC Four. If you missed it you can still watch on iPlayer – but it’s for a limited period only (29 days from today, Dec 1st 22) so don’t leave it too long! It’s being shown again as part of the British Film Institute’s 100 BBC TV Gamechangers, and how fitting that it should be one of Potter’s dramas in which the Forest played a crucial part. As the afflicted author Phillip Marlow lies in a hospital bed, memories of his Forest of Dean childhood intermingle with the plot and characters of his hard-boiled detective fiction. Marlow suffers from the same dreadful chronic condition that Potter did - psoriatic arthropathy – and there are many other elements of the story that are drawn from the author’s life. But, as Potter pointed out, incidents in the author’s life are the raw materials on which he draws, and we should not draw too many conclusions from what appears. Local extras featured as well as local locations and you can hear Forest location scout, ex-teacher John Belcher talking about that here: https://vimeo.com/70470812 The current screening marking 100 years of the BBC was preceded with actor Alison Steadman reflecting on her experience of filming, and, as she points out weeks of rehearsal prior to filming – a luxury rarely afforded TV actors today. Like many of the programmes from the past that make up the Gamechangers list, there are moments in The Singing Detective that may well jar with contemporary viewers, but worth remembering this is television from another time, depicting the attitudes of society at the time – and indeed in this case is arguably a critiquing them. As Steadman points out, television was made differently then too, longer in the marking, as well as the work itself taking its time to portray characters and scenes, and tell its story. So, if you’ve not seen it, or it’s been a while, block out some time, sit back and enjoy a true masterpiece – from the pen of one of the Forest of Dean’s finest and most important authors.

"Curtains are drawn to keep in the grief..."

10/21/2021

It was today, 21st October, 55 years ago that 116 children and 28 adults were killed in the village of Aberfan. After days of torrential rain the colliery spoil or 'slag' heap that towered over the village slid down to engulf Pantglas Junior School and near-by houses. The village lost a generation.

That summer 31 year old Dennis Potter and his family had moved back to the Forest of Dean and on news of the events in Wales he was dispatched by the journal New Society to report on the aftermath. His report published a few days later on the 27th is a masterpiece. It captures the subtle nature of shock and grief he perceives amongst the residents of the town, and the families of those killed. It is full of empathy but as ever with Potter's writing it is never mawkish. It is suffused instead with controlled and directed rage: Rage at God, rage at the national Coal Board, rage at the government:

"If only the so-called socialists who run this ugly country would yap less about their glorious heritage and do a damned site more to remove the inglorious legacy which is still rammed down so many people's throats every time they open their mouths to breathe"

The article is just one of the many examples of Potter's journalism reproduced in The Art of Invective: Selected Non-Fiction 1953-94 published by Oberon books. This important contribution to Potter scholarship was brought together by editors Ian Greaves, David Rolinson and John Williams. Potter's own hand-written drafts (all 4 of them) of his report on Aberfan are part fo the incredible Dennis Potter Archive held at the Dean Heritage Centre in the Forest of Dean. This and other items in the collection are available to view by appointment. Explore the catalogue and book your visit here.

List of Potter Treasures Now Online

9/23/2021

The home of the Dennis Potter Archive & Exhibition, the Dean Heritage Centre is now fully reopened following a period of temporary closure due to the UK Covid lockdown. Staff and volunteers are back on site, visitors are streaming through the doors, school groups are being welcomed and a series of special events have already kicked off. Housed at the museum, the Dennis Potter Exhibition offers the general visitor an introduction to his life and career, and his significance in British culture of the latter half of the twentieth century. For the dedicated Potter fan or researcher, the wider museum, including the on-site Potter audio trail, provides a marvellous context giving an insight into the place that meant so much to him - the Forest of Dean. But this is not all the museum has to offer because stored behind the scenes in a climate controlled fire proof vault are the Dennis Potter papers. This incredible collection of invaluable documents was secured for the museum in 2012 by the joint efforts of the museum team, academics at the University of Gloucestershire, the local Voices in the Forest CIC, and the support of Professor John Cook. A grant from the National Lottery made the purchase of the papers and the setting up of the archive and exhibition possible. Now, after years of work by dedicated museum staff and specially trained volunteers the papers are catalogued. Amongst the many treasures in the collection are drafts of Potter's unfinished novel Country Boy, numerous journalism, handwritten notebooks, and never-produced screenplays. There are also drafts, rehearsal scripts, correspondence and production ephemera connected to his many well-loved drama series such as Pennies from Heaven, and The Signing Detective. The full catalogue is now available from the Dean Heritage Museum website and visits to view the material in person can also be booked. A word of warning: If your travelling from afar - make sure to book yourself accommodation as you'll want more than one day amongst these precious Potter treasures!

On his birthday: remembering Dennis Potter... the author.

5/14/2021

There was nothing out of the ordinary about a birth that took place on this day (17th May) 1935. The mother and father were living with her parents (not uncommon at the time), and so cramped were conditions that the birth took place at a neighbour’s house. The child was born at Brick House in Joyford on the edge of Berry Hill in the Forest of Dean. There was little that was remarkable either about the child as he grew up, playing in the woods, watching his grandfather in the village silver band and his mum and dad regularly doing a musical ‘turn’ at the local club. But he did well at school, and academic success for this son of a Forest coal miner would lead to a world of possibilities. After National Service he was off to New College Oxford where he plunged wholeheartedly into student life – taking part in drama productions and becoming editor of the prestigious student newspaper The Isis. The old pre-War class barriers were beginning to breakdown, and more opportunities were opening up. So, what would this young man do with his ‘shiny new degree’?

We remember Dennis Potter today for his remarkable career in television, and perhaps here in the Forest of Dean most of all for his dramas Pennies from Heaven (1978), The Singing Detective (1986), and Cold Lazarus (1996) all featuring locally shot scenes (as well as local extras). There was the earlier – and for some, controversial – Wednesday Play A Beast with Two Backs (1968) much of which was also shot on location in the Forest. Television was Potter’s true passion and he had a huge impact on the development of television drama in particular. But his talents and interests were by no means limited to that one medium. He was a prolific journalist too (see The Art of Invective: selected non-fiction 1953-94, published in 2015), screenwriter for cinema, playwright for the stage, producer and director, cultural commentator, and even at one point stood for Parliament. And of particular interest for us at Reading the Forest, he was an author too.

He wrote his first book, The Glittering Coffin (1960), whilst still at university. It was a ‘state of the nation’ work commenting on the society and politics of the time. It was highly personal in places with Potter writing in some detail (though briefly) about the Forest of Dean by way of example. At one point he admits, ‘I cannot hope to convey all that has happened in this district, but intend to produce a detailed study of the breakdown of a distinct regional identity at some future date’ (p44).

In 1962 his second book, The Changing Forest was published, and in some ways, it was indeed simply an expansion of those few paragraphs he’d written about the Forest in A Glittering Coffin. It was also though a more crafted and controlled expansion of the themes he’d touched on his BBC television documentary Between Two Rivers (1960). His first major piece of television work (he’d already appeared briefly in the documentary Does Class Matter whilst still a student and had worked on Panorama as a BBC trainee) that he wrote and presented, had upset many people in the Forest (though not all) who saw it. The opening half in particular saw Potter appearing to criticise his family and friends in the Forest, before later in the programme admitting he’d now changed his thinking and could now see the vitality and value of the Forest’s community and culture. In his book, The Changing Forest, Potter had the space, and the control over content, to express some of the detail and nuance that he wasn’t able to in the television format of Between Two Rivers. In the book (that shares a great deal with the programme) he spends more time with people and explores themes at greater length and in more detail. Potter as author is able to order and shape both evidence and argument in a way that he simply couldn’t in the television documentary. Potter’s developing skills as a journalist are clearly evident in The Changing Forest, but his authorship, just as in his work for television, would soon turn towards fiction-writing – art the better form, he realised, for telling truth. In all Potter would write four novels, and like his television dramas, they are often complex and challenging. As a young man he’d begun working on a novel, The Country Boy, though he never finished it. The various manuscripts of it are today housed in the Potter Archive at the Dean Heritage Centre (available to view on request). A few lines stand out as particularly poignant to those of us who know the Forest of Dean well. The young protagonist, David, is moved away from the Forest of Dean and is at a city-centre school in Fulham (just as Potter had). The other children refer to him as ‘the country boy’ because of his speech, but he finds it:

‘impossible to explain, he came from a hilly, green and lovely certainly, yet coalmining part of England, on the border of Wales. The Forest, the land on its own. Not just “the country”’

(for further details and analysis of this work see Carpenter, 1998, p86-88). There are other scenes in the unfinished story that reappear nearly thirty years later in The Singing Detective, just as in a similar fashion the novels that he did complete and publish would inspire - or be inspired by - some of his other television work.

Potter’s first published novel was Hide and Seek (1973). Arguably a masterpiece of post-modern literature, the book plays to great effect with the novel form and the whole concept of the omnipotent author. Reading this challenging and exciting work it becomes clear that several of its ideas also made their way into The Singing Detective and later Karaoke (1996). The blurring of boundaries between author, protagonist and text are particularly striking, as is one scene in particular featuring a psychiatric consultation, all of which reappear in the television drama. Like much of Potter’s television work, the novel features seemingly biographical elements. It’s protagonist, Daniel Field, like Potter, went to Oxford and he grew up in the Forest of Dean; the narrator in the book suffers from the same devastating skin disease as Potter; and Potter is known to at one point have had an appointment with a London psychiatrist. But as Potter would often explain, a writer’s experiences are merely the raw material he draws on and reshapes rather than a literal retelling of biographical incidents. But, as his biographer Humphrey Carpenter wrote, Potter’s message in this complex and tricky novel seems to be aimed at any future biographers, ‘I have been playing hide-and-seek with you. You think you are writing my life, but I am leaning over your shoulder, writing it for you. You, even you, are a character in my story. I can manipulate you too’ (Dennis Potter: The Authorized Biography, 1998, p291).

Potter's next novel, Pennies from Heaven (1981), was a far more straightforward work. After his 1978 BBC television serial, memorably featuring actors ‘lip synching’ to popular songs of the 1920s and 30s, and scenes filmed in the Forest of Dean, Potter had adapted the script into an MGM film released in 1981. Around the same time, he turned the now USA-located narrative into a novel, the main challenge being that of conveying the same ideas without the musical elements of the film and television versions.

Ticket to Ride (1986) saw a return by Potter to previous form regarding his novel writing. Much like Hide and Seek, this novel was again dealing with themes of male sexual desire, breakdown, and the seemingly fractured self. The book opens as the protagonist suffers amnesia on a train as it arrives at Paddington Station, a moment of catastrophe that triggers a seeming division of John Buck, and the introduction of his internal ‘secret friend’. Potter is said to have written it in a burst of creative energy over 60 days, whilst also working on drafts of The Singing Detective screenplay (Carpenter, p446). The book was well received by the (literary) critics and was even considered as an entry for the Booker Prize (John Cook, Dennis Potter: A Life on Screen, 1995, p208). Again, there were elements in this novel that relate to some of his previous television plays. He went on to adapt it for the screen becoming the film Secret Friends (1991) starring Alan Bates and Gina Bellman, a film Potter himself directed.

He would go on to adapt his next novel Blackeyes (1987) also for the screen, this time as a four-part television drama of the same name broadcast on BBC2 in 1989. The TV adaptation starred Gina Bellman as a model and niece of an ageing writer (who in the television version also narrates her story). Potter dedicated the book to his daughters (Sarah and Jane, in their twenties at the time), and in it he addresses how advertising - and culture more widely – commodifies and objectifies women’s bodies. He later explained how this was by-extension a comment on culture and society in general. What was perhaps safer territory to explore within a novel made for a far more problematic and controversial television outing, inducing criticism for what many saw as the drama's own objectification of women. In the novel Potter again addresses the issue of ‘authorship’ through both the character of her uncle, himself a writer who seeks to exploit his niece’s experiences in his own work, and the ‘author’ of the novel we are reading, himself another character, ‘Jeff’, in the book (Cook, p261).

Potter saw television as a means of communication that cut through the old class barriers that divided the audience of ‘high art’ (high-brow literature, fine art, opera etc.) from that of the ‘popular’ (pop music, variety entertainment, etc.). Television offered the opportunity to speak to all parts of society at the same time and Potter seized it. His feelings towards the novel as a form were more ambivalent. On the one had he felt that writing a novel gave him ‘a certain freedom and relief’ from the demands of writing for the screen, whilst at the same time he believed that the novel as a contemporary form of writing ‘is almost dead’ (Potter On Potter, 1994, p127).

If the only work Dennis Potter had ever produced were his four novels he would surely demand our attention, and in the Forest of Dean some pride in his achievements. The fact that they represent the merest tiny fraction of his creative output is instead remarkable (see W. Stephen Gilbert's Fight & Kick & Bite: The Life and Work of Dennis Potter, 1995 for an excellent list of all of Potter's work). Yes, Potter will rightly be remembered and celebrated for his contribution to television. In the Forest of Dean in particular he will be remembered for the plays that saw the exciting world of television production set up shop (temporarily at least) in the neighbourhood. Of his books, if at all, it is his record and analysis of the area in the 1960s, The Changing Forest that continues to resonate to this day. But, whether in the Forest of Dean or anywhere else in the world, despite Potter’s own thoughts on the novel, pick up one his books for a change, and marvel at the genius of this sorely missed fine mind and creative talent!

Dr Jason Griffiths, co-director Reading the Forest, University of Gloucestershire