Potter, Dennis (Christopher George)

Potter, Dennis (Christopher George) (1935–94), playwright, born in the Forest of Dean, the son of a miner. He was educated at New College, Oxford, where he became involved in left-wing politics. He wrote fiction, stage plays, and screenplays, but is best known for his television plays, which show an original and inventive use of the medium. These include two plays dealing with the career of an aspiring working-class, Oxford-educated politician, Vote, Vote, Vote for Nigel Barton (1965) and Stand up, Nigel Barton (1965); Pennies from Heaven (1978, pub. 1981, a six-part serial); and Blue Remembered Hills (1979, a tragic evocation of childhood). Brimstone and Treacle (1978) was first performed on stage after being banned for television performance. Potter's experience of psoriatic arthropothy, a debilitating condidion affecting skin and joints, is central to his six-part serial The Singing Detective (1986), a multi-layered narrative, moving between a moody 1940s thriller, and incorporating songs of that period, and a present-day hospital ward. Blackeyes (1989) is a study of sexual exploitation, and Lipstick on Your Collar (1993) a musical black comedy based on Potter's National Service experiences. His final work was a pair of linked serials, Karaoke and Cold Lazarus, a futuristic and dystopian confrontation of imminent death and the meaning of memory, completed weeks before he died.