Dennis Potter's principal achievements comprise forty-odd television plays, eight films, five stage plays, four novels and three non-fiction works. His considerable fame in Britain arose early. Intellectual brilliance and fervent expressions of social concern, a conviction of the importance of holding the world in care, stoutly asserted if idiosyncratic Christian values and innovative dramatic technique led to countless interviews on and off the BBC television screen. Over the years, he incorporated explicit sexual situations which often dramatized psycho­pathological problems. These no doubt boosted his ratings; they also made him notorious among bluenoses.

When “The Singing Detective” appeared on American public television in 1988, it enthralled me and excited my professional interest as a remarkably profound psychological study. Immediately following its presentation, excerpts from other Potter productions provided a hint of his diverse accomplishments and suggested that many details of Marlow’s life were almost exact replicas of Potter’s. An interview was also shown in which Potter denied vehemently that anything in it was autobiographical. As I watched, the overlap of the protagonist writer's fictional life with the actualities of his creator's real one offered tantalizing stimulation to my own detective instincts. In 1990, with a colleague, William Jeffries, I presented a study of the play at a national convention of the American Psychoanalytic Association. In 1992 New York’s Museum of Television and Radio held a gala celebration of Potter and his works and a series of seminars in which Potter participated. The decision to study the man and his work proved to require that I surmount formidable obstacles. Nothing, literally, on film, tape, nor in print was available in the United States. Stubborn perseverance and almost incredible good luck led, ultimately, to a serendipitous boon.

The problems to be investigated were by no means confined to the inhibitions, the guilt and the shame of Marlow as a tormented neurotic, nor of the boy Philip who was to become the disease-scourged writer. Rather, the challenge was to discern how sexual guilt and tempestuous incestuous feelings were seized upon and exploited in Marlow’s story. Hidden behind the drama is evidence of a man's paranoid projection of the despised erotic female within himself onto a double. Behind these loomed Potter himself. In a televised interview shown on American public TV at the same time as its presentation, he denied to BBC executive Yentob that there was anything autobiographical in it. My research disclosed that Potter, discussing that portrayal, however, had told critic Richard Corliss in 1988: “And yet there's something to it that comes closer to the bone than I ever wanted or intended. I realized this when I first watched the rushes. I started to get clammy-handed.” Trodd told me: “He was astonished and rather traumatized by what he'd revealed about himself after he saw the finished product.” (Personal communication, 1989). Later, after he was roundly attacked about “Blackeyes,” Ginny Dougary, a respected drama critic, wrote (1992): “Potter himself tells me, somewhat unconvincingly, that “The Singing Detective” is reworked autobiography because he was too lazy to research something else.” Potter thus presented a puzzle as to what he had introduced deliberately and what genuinely surprised him

In 1993, Peter Stead published a biography of the playwright in a slender and idiosyncratic volume, Dennis Potter. That year also saw an extended, equally idiosyncratic series of interviews with the playwright, edited by Graham Fuller and published as "Potter on Potter". In 1995, "Dennis Potter, A Life on Screen", by John Cook, appeared, and then W. Stephen Gilbert’s "Fight & Kick & Bite. The Life and Work of Dennis Potter". In 1998, Faber & Faber published Humphrey Carpenter’s authorized biography, and in 2000, St. Martin’s Press published "The Passion of Dennis Potter" edited by Vernon Gras and John Cook. Thanks to the existence of these studies I am free to edit an earlier version of this essay, and to write more thematically and selectively at this time.

Despite Gilbert’s avowed determination to avoid Potter’s “seamy side,” as he declared more than once, his biography con­firms speculations which I had hazarded. For example, he quoted (p. 36) from a 1968 newspaper article, which he states Potter showed him, to the effect that for most of his early life, Dennis slept in the same narrow bed with his one year younger sister, sharing a small bedroom with their father and mother. That sleeping arrangement was the same when Dennis was fourteen. Gilbert took care not to wonder what took place in that room or what it meant to Potter, that “seamy side” which can so often lead to the heart of a biography. There had been several moves into the homes of close family members during those years; sleeping arrangements must have varied. His father was not able to make all of these moves. During one such interim, Dennis was sexually molested. The consequences were to reverberate throughout his life and work.

To his acknowledgment that “ . . . Potter’s own people were perplexed, sometimes repelled by and resentful of his work,” Gilbert adds: “This book has a degree of rehabilitation to do.” That effort and Bowdlerization impair his biography, and despite Gilbert’s bravado: “We need not be browbeaten by Potter’s sometimes excessive language and alarming aggression,” he does seem to have been intimidated.
Unlike Gilbert, I intend no rehabilitation. I had no significant direct contact with Potter or his family. Almost every detail pertaining to them aside from that during formal interviews is second-hand. What has been reported about his attitude and behavior has rarely been laudatory. Gilbert’s remarks about Potter’s language and “alarming aggression” allude to characteristics which are not in the least atypical. So much of Potter is in his works, however, that an incongruity is evident at the outset in the regularity with which Potter proclaimed a concern with “holding in care.” He found redemp­tion in the underlying love which he felt that he held toward others, even as he so lavishly heaped verbal abuse upon them.

Through the late 70's and the 80's, Potter's work had received the highest accolades in England. Few Americans had heard of him by 1988, however. Their chief opportunities to see his work had been through two films. One, Blade on the Feather (1980), an excellent British spy thriller, stars Tom Conti, Donald Pleasance, and Denholm Elliot. Few Americans noted the name of the playwright. “Pennies from Heaven” appeared as an MGM film adaptation after its huge success on British television. Potter was summoned to California and obliged to rewrite the script repeatedly. The work was condensed from an eight hour, six-part television triumph, the biggest production of its kind ever shown in Britain, to emerge as a typical Hollywood product. Potter returned home more hostile to America than ever.

The year after Potter’s death (in April 1994,) the premiere of his last two plays, at Southbank’s National Film Theatre, and articles which Potter wrote for subsequent posthumous publication have provided still more significant data.