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1979
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Blue Remembered Hills
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Transmission Info: First broadcast on 30 January 1979 by BBC1 (Play for Today) at 9.28 p.m. Duration 72 minutes. Repeated 30 May 1980 BBC1; 19 May 1991 Channel 4. The play was screened again as part of the BBC series Potter at the BBC, commemorating the tenth anniversary of his death, on BBC4 Saturday 25 December 2004 11.10pm-12.20am The script of Blue Remembered Hills (together with those of Joe's Ark and Cream in My Coffee) was published by Faber and Faber as "Waiting for the Boat" in 1984. The scripts were re-issued in 1996, under the title, "Blue Remembered Hills and Other Plays" ISBN 0 571 17906 1. These volumes also contain an introduction, written by Potter, entitled "Some sort of preface ..." Potter also provides a brief introduction to each of the three plays. As part of their Spring Season, the Dukes Theatre in Lancaster will be producing Blue Remembered Hills from 4th February until 26th February 2005, directed by Ian Hastings. More ... Another rendition of Blue Remembered Hills is offered by the Belgrade Theatre, Coventry from 19th February until 4th March 2005. More details here ...
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Source: Potter (1996: 38)
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Source: Gilbert (1995: 347)
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The story
revolves around a summer's afternoon in a remote country setting -
according to the script in the West Country, [the play was actually
shot in Dorset] but probably meant to represent the Forest of Dean
- in 1943. A group of seven seven year olds are playing in the forest.
The play opens with Willie, eating an apple and pretending to pilot
a war plane, when he encounters, falling from a tree as a parachutist,
Peter. After a fight over Willie's apple - in which Peter attempts
to show how powerful a bully he can be - the two eventually spot a
squirrel and chase and corner it up a tree. They are joined by John
and Raymond , and the group of lads attempt to force the squirrel
down the tree and managed to trap and kill it. As Cook (1995: 115) points out, "the killing of the squirrel and the girls' baiting of Donald have just been rehearsals for a much more horrific persecution at the end of the play."
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Banks_Smith,
N. (1979) television review, The Guardian, 21 January
Blue Remembered Hills won the 1980 BAFTA TV Award for Best Single Play
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"The loss of Eden is experienced by each and everyone of us as we leave the wonder and magic and also the pains and terrors of childhood .... . Whereas the discipline is imposed by an adult, when children are amongst themselves, it's all continual fidget and movement, exploration, speculation, wonder. In a sense to lose that is to lose Eden, is to be expelled from the Garden." (Potter, from 1990 Interview with John Cook) Following on soon after the massive success of Pennies from Heaven, Blue Remembered Hills (BRH) is quintessentially Potter and yet, in important respects, unlike most of the rest of his work. Out of line with much that he had previously written, BRH is, at first sight, at least, one of the most naturalistic dramas to have emerged from Potter's pen. As he described it himself in his introduction to the published scripts, "Compared with most of the plays I have written, ..., it is by far the simplest in both form and content, for as well as taking place without hindrance, diversion or any kind of secondary plot, the characters - being children - are not allowed eloquence, obvious introspection, rhetoric or even the useful consolations (and normal dramatic lie) of properly consecutive thought." (Potter 1984a) However, this "naturalism" is counterfeit, as we might expect from Potter. First, he introduces what he refers to as a "ripple" on the surface of this naturalism: he has all the child characters played by adult actors. Second, he chooses to utilise adult bodies as he sees them as a "magnifying glass but also ... as the seismograph which could more truthfully measure the quakes and tremors of childhood's emotions" (Potter 1984a), and disturbs us with the savagery of their behaviour - much as Golding did with Lord of the Flies. The child characters portrayed are aged seven at about the same sort of time that Potter himself would have been seven or so, and our immediate thought might be that here again is an instance of Potter becoming (nostalically?) autobiographical. But such nostalgia would be misplaced. His vision of the childhood of the 1940s is far from romanticised and Houseman's poem which provides the title and the final voiceover is used ironically. Childhood, in BRH, is not the innocent and romantic memory for Potter but rather a deeper insight into the way the human mind and emotions work - at whatever age. Further critical comment: Carpenter, H. (1998) Dennis Potter: The Authorised Biography, Faber & Faber, pp. 380 - 6 Cook, J. (1995) Dennis Potter:A Life on Screen, Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 113-117 Creeber, G. (1998) Dennis Potter: Between Two Worlds. A critical reassessment, Basingstoke: Macmillan, pp. 57 - 64
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Dave Evans 1994 - 2005