Whatever criticisms can be brought to bear on this book, one thing must be admitted from the outset. Carpenter has done an encyclopaedic job of bringing together in a comparatively short space of time a wealth of material on Dennis Potter. Admittedly he had the full resource of the estate behind him, but even so he covers Potter's life, career and work in immense detail and in a highly readable style.

In his Prologue, Carpenter admits that he was not on the list of possible biographers which the estate initially drew up for Potter to consider on his deathbed, and that he never met Potter. He does not make clear, however, how it came to pass that he was finally selected as the biographer. He does, though, confess something which will resonate with many Potter watchers - that he has been watching Dennis Potter's work on TV since 1965, as a nineteen-year-old. I too watched Stand Up Nigel Barton when it was first transmitted on 8th December 1965 (I was but a fifteen-year-old) and I can still recall the effect which watching the play had on me then (and has continued to have).

Carpenter is particularly successful in documenting Potter's early life in the Forest of Dean and at Oxford, (as indeed was Gilbert in Fight and Kick and Bite) and in drawing in to the descriptions a wide range of contemporary and background comment. But there are two aspects of the biography which I see as weaknesses and which overall detract from his venture of "pursu(e)[ing] the 'real' Dennis Potter through the tangled forests of his extra-ordinary life".

The first weakness, as I see it,  is the almost obsessional nature of Carpenter's attention to the alleged incidents and periods in Potter's life which relate to sexual activity or sexual fantasy. Included amongst these are the alleged incidences of sexual abuse at the "hands" of his uncle (to which Potter himself makes references), his almost priapic resort to the use of prostitutes and his alleged interests or obsessions (via fantasy or otherwise) in  women such as Caroline Seebohm, Kika Markham, Gina Bellman and Louise Germaine. Whilst these are eminently readable episodes, they are the stuff of tabloid consumption and representative of just the kind of prurient interest which Daniel Feeld's head (and memory) ran the risk of being subjected to at the hands of Masdon and Siltz in Cold Lazarus.  It is not without coincidence that the extracts from the biography which were serialised in The Sunday Times excerpts (16, 23, 30 August 1998) focussed almost sinlge-mindedly on the sorts of episodes with banner headlines such as "OBSESSION" and "BLACKEYES and the making of Dirty Den". It could from this be construed that the worthwhile parts of the biography were merely a vehicle for this sort of distorting prurience.

The second weakness concerns the missed opportunities for analysis which derived from Carpenter's unique access to Potter's manuscripts, many of them of Potter works which have never seen the light of day. Of course, it is marvellous that we are given tasty morsels of unpublished scripts but, as with most of the treatment which Carpenter offers of Potter's works, there is only ever a very superficial level of analysis given to the dramatic material, the very material without which there would not need to be a biography written in the first place.

Perhaps these criticisms are unfair. After all, Carpenter is a populist biographer who knows his audience and understands the universal appeal of digging the dirt. But in spite of the 590 pages of prose the biography is composed of, there are missed opportunities. Perhaps we should be grateful that Carpenter has only started the job and given the bare, if numerous, bones. At least this means that there's plenty more muscle and sinew still to be investigated by future generations of Potter people - if only they can ever get access to the same resource as Carpenter had.