THINGS are both more trivial then they ever were and more important than they ever were. And the difference between the trivial and the important doesn't seem to matter but the nowness of everything is absolutely wondrous."
Whatever anyone thought about Dennis Potter as a dramatist, nobody who saw him talking to Melvyn Bragg about his imminent death will ever forget it. It was Potter's final act of drama for the small screen and perhaps his finest. Here finally was the Potter "voice" without being mediated by an actor. The lilting cadences of his working class Welsh boyhood combined with the vocabulary of the Grammar school poet who made it to Oxford that no actor (and Potter has been served by the finest of our time) could ever quite capture.
We knew this man, his history and his world. From the Nigel Barton plays (based on his unsuccessful Labour candidature in the 1964 British General Election), to the "musical" trilogy Pennies From Heaven, The Singing Detective and Lipstick On Your Collar, we had watched and listened to the 20th century slip by in uncomfortable familiarity, decade by decade, through the eyes, mind and ears of the boy whose childhood memories found echoes in our own blue remembered hills.
But such public embracing of his life's end had longer term implications. It was, in effect, Dennis Potter's last will and testament. And like many such, it offered a chance to settle old scores. He had written, he told us, two last plays. As his body of work for television was "not insignificant", their broadcast, he believed, would be "a fitting memorial". He was very specific.
Karaoke, the first of the linked dramas, should be shown first on BBC 1 and repeated the same week on Channel 4. The second, Cold Lazarus, should be shown first on Channel 4 and repeated on BBC 1.
It was blackmail. A final attempt to wrestle control of the airwaves, just for a nanosecond (more precisely 8 x 55 "minute episodes) from those who Potter believed were destroying the medium to which he had committed his life. Needless to say this broadcast bequest was news to the executors. Yet such was Dennis Potter's hold on the medium's conscience that, for the first time in their history, feuding rivalries were set aside. His provocative, yet sentimental bequest has been followed to the letter. The first episode of Karaoke is screened on BBC 1 on Sunday April 28th and repeated the following evening on Channel 4.
It was Potter's unique juxtaposition of the provocative and the sentimental that provided the dynamic to his work. The harsh realities of life (sex without romance, disease, cruelty, loss of innocence) were set against the ersatz yet addictive sentimentality of popular songs.
BORN in 1935, he and television were of an age. He recognised early on the power of the box in the corner of the room. A lifelong socialist, he saw television as Britain's true national theatre, completely egalitarian, where the most challenging drama could reach literally everyone.
In the early days, it did. For a start there was no competition. In the 1960s the BBC's Wednesday Play was required watching. And plays could make a difference. It was the time of Cathy Come Home, Ken Loach, Alan Plater and Trevor Griffiths. The visual constraints of tape, static cameras and poor sound quality led Potter to innovate. A Dennis Potter drama was neither poor man's cinema nor a theatre play in all but name, but a new narrative medium. He broke down naturalistic barriers and invented a whole new televisual vocabulary in which the role of memory was pivotal a dense collage of flashbacks and voice overs which gave depth and texture to the flat black and white visual images. Later, when the verisimilitude of colour and film was in danger of lulling the viewer into complacency, came Potter's trademark freezing of narrative as his cast, often dropping out of character, mimed to long forgotten popular ballads and love songs.
There area those who believe that Pennies From Heaven (1978) the first time Potter used this Brechtian alienation technique, marked the end of his career as a polemical dramatist. (He already had 14 single plays under his belt not to mention Casanova and Son Of Man. ) But the sugaring of the serious issues pill proved popular with Pennies From Heaven, The Singing Detective and Lipstick On Your Collar, set in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s respectively are now seen as definitive Potter and his earlier work largely forgotten.
Karaoke, the first of the two linked dramas, which begins next weekend, is written much in this latter mould, but as the title suggests, music is central to Karaoke and not used simply as a counterpoint. Its narrative device is the old chestnut of a film within a film, but the hall of mirrors Potter presents comes with the added layer of "real" reality, our knowledge of the author and his death. Where in The Singing Detective we had Michael Gambon dealing with Potter's psoriasis, in Karaoke we have Albert Finney playing the writer of the film within the drama dying of pancreatic cancer. It is classic Potter country, willowy girls, violent sex (hinted at rather than seen), spinning around the spindle of an angry but essentially benign central character wracked with emotional and physical pain.
The second of the two, Cold Lazarus, appears at first very different territory, set 400 years hence in a post modern futurist world more Bladerunner than Star Trek. Daniel Feeld (Finney), frozen at death at his own behest, has been reluctantly brought back to life that is to say, the only bit the scientists are interested in, his head, has been revitalised. Unable to speak (no larynx) or do anything other than move his eyes, the dead writer is haunted by memories of his childhood and his last few years on earth, replaying the tapes over and over again, longing to die. But as these memories are the only access this future generation has to life as it was lived in the 20th century, death is not that easy to come by, particularly when scientists sell out to media interests.
Producing posthumous work presents its own difficulties. Edits or changes that might have been easily agreed if Potter had been around to okay them remain untouched. Ad libs, grace notes regularly added by Potter during production, are missing. To complete the two scripts in time, Potter wrote at a seemingly impossible rate, completing eight hour long episodes within the eight weeks doctors told him was all he had left. Ten pages a day, keeping the morphine to a minimum in order to keep his head clear. It was, literally, a race Q the death.
AND it was not just the text. In the last few years Dennis Potter, had become increasingly involved in the production of his work(the universally disparaged Blackeyes was self directed) and Karaoke and Cold Lazarus were to be no exception. ,His bequest came complete with covenants. His choice of director Renny Rye, responsible for Lipstick On Your Collar and Midnight Movie, was seen as a bitter pill but was eventually swallowed. Producers, designers, editors - Potter was still pulling in his final team as his life slipped away. In terms of actors there were only two stipulations.
Louise Jamieson, the pouting blonde of Lipstick and Roy Hudd, the comedian whose role in Lipstick led to a new, late career as a straight actor. In the event Jamieson's pregnancy prevented her from taking the part which went to another model turned actress, Saffron Burrows.
Sadly, this unprecedented collaboration between the Montagues and Capulds of British TV on the death of its favourite son owes more to nostalgia than any radical change of heart. Any hopes Potter might have nursed that through this public mandate television drama might once more be raised above considerations of ratings and money making are frankly remote. He always recognised television's potential as a force in social control and never disguised his hatred of the corruption of television run by accountants, leading to the faceless, authorless format drama that is bread and butter to all channels now. His Machiavelli was Rupert Murdoch (Potter even named his cancer Rupert) who, as the man who bought the left wing newspaper for which Potter at one time wrote for, The Sun, transformed it into its present shape. If the character of sinister media mogul David Siltz (Henry Goodman) is not exactly a dead ringer for Murdoch, according to old friend and collaborator, producer Kenith Trodd, "the parallel is clear to see".
From now until the end of June, Dennis Potter will shape Sunday (or Monday) nights for anyone to whom good television still means something. The work of a master is always to be savoured but whether this is drama that deserves the stature of a last supper is yet to be judged. But swan song or clarion call to the next generation, what is undoubtedly true is that we will never see his like again.