A Way to Live, the Way to Die: Dennis Potter (1935-1994)

Dennis Potter lived on TV. He was a dramatist, not an actor, yet viewers in his native England and abroad knew Potter’s life story through his teleplays. In 1964 he ran unsuccessfully for a seat in Parliament as a Labour Party candidate, then wrote his two Nigel Barton plays about a Labour M.P. that hit such a nerve the party demanded they be softened. He fictionalized his military service in last year’s six-parter, Lipstick on Your Collar. His 1986 magical musical memory masterpiece, The Singing Detective, pictured a writer who, while suffering an egregious skin disease, psoriatic arthropathy (as Potter did), recalls his youth in Gloucestershire’s Forest of Dean (where he grew up). For a quarter-century, Potter was England’s raw conscience, its collective grudge keeper and, to many, its pre-eminent playwright.

For the chronically disabled Potter, life was a death sentence; but he would have the last word. So this spring, two months before he succumbed at 59 to cancer of the pancreas and liver, he staged his own funeral oration on Britain’s Channel 4 program Without Walls. In the 70-minute conversation with host Melvyn Bragg, the dying man displayed a new, calm bravery. At one point he paused, knee-high in the stream of his eloquence, to ask if he might take a sip of liquid morphine to ease his pain. Bragg wondered if they should stop; Potter replied, “It’s better to go on.” As another poet of profound distress, Samuel Beckett, wrote, “I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”

Potter went on, heroically, from the day he learned his cancer was incurable, Valentine’s Day — “a little gift, a little kiss from somebody or something.” He continued to care for his wife Margaret, whom he called “my rock, my center,” as she battled breast cancer. And he worked ferociously, testing the limits of his anguish, to complete two teleplays: Karaoke, another musical drama; and Cold Lazarus, about a 20th century man whose head has been preserved for 400 years. Potter planned to write 10 pages a day. “I will — and do — meet that schedule every day,” he told Bragg. “My only regret is to die four pages too soon.” Sticking a cigarette between fingers crippled by arthritis, then puffing on “this lovely tube of delight,” he said he was a physical coward in his youth. But now, dying, “you find out that in fact, at the last, thank God, you’re not actually a coward.”

If nothing became Potter’s life so much as his grace in leaving it, then nothing became his death so much as his having written so often about it. Mortality hung on his plays like crape. While awaiting his own demise, Philip Marlow, the hero of The Singing Detective, plots the death of all who may have hurt him. Lipstick on Your Collar climaxes at a grave site, where one of the three main characters is dead, a second falls into the open grave, and a third woos the widow — all to the ’50s tune Sh-Boom! “We’re the one animal that knows we’re going to die,” Potter said. “And yet we carry on, behaving as though there’s eternity.”

In his 40 TV pieces — and in his stage plays (Sufficient Carbohydrate), screenplays (Track 29) and novels (Ticket to Ride) — Potter did see things under the aspect of eternity. Novelist Julian Barnes aptly described him as “a Christian socialist with a running edge of apocalyptic disgust.” Christian, yes, in residue. Though Potter gave ecclesiastics the willies with his God play (Son of Man) and his Devil play (Brimstone and Treacle), he could still recite, as meaningfully as if it were a pop standard, the words to an old hymn: “Will there be any stars, any stars in my crown?” Socialist, yes, decrying British mercantilism that turns everyone “from a citizen into a consumer. And politics is a commodity.” Apocalyptic disgust? Plenty, even at the end. He told Bragg he had named his cancer Rupert, for Murdoch, the media warlord.

His rage against Murdoch was part of a general anger at the present for not living up to the image in the gilded rearview mirror Potter held to his youth. In Blue Remembered Hills he re-created his West Country childhood (but with adult actors as the kids). He larded his breakthrough series, Pennies from Heaven, with sentimental tunes from his ’30s infancy. “Childhood,” Potter said, “is full to the brim with fear, horror, excitement, joy, boredom, love, anxiety.” He was welcome to cherish his youth; he never got to savor old age.

“We should always look back on our own past,” he said, “with a sort of tender contempt.” The past echoed in Potter’s inner ear like an accordion rendition of Peg o’ My Heart: trite, tinny, extraordinarily potent. But as his days dwindled, he attended, rapturously, to the present. “I’m almost serene,” he said to Bragg. “I can celebrate life. Below my window there’s an apple tree in blossom. It’s white. And looking at it — instead of saying, ‘Oh, that’s a nice blossom’ — now, looking at it through the window, I see the whitest, frothiest, blossomest blossom that there ever could be. The nowness of everything is absolutely wondrous. If you see the present tense — boy, do you see it. And boy, do you celebrate it.”

In every life there is so much to celebrate, so much to mourn. In his last days, Dennis Potter did both. Triumphantly, he finished his two plays — two final blossoms soaked in acid. And he nursed his wife until she died. A week later, disconsolate, Potter followed her, with blood in his eyes and stars in his crown.