[Dennis Christopher George Potter was an English television dramatist, screenwriter and journalist. He is best known for his BBC television serials Pennies from Heaven and The Singing Detective as well as the BBC television plays Blue Remembered Hills and Brimstone and Treacle.
Born: May 17, 1935, Berry Hill, United Kingdom
Died: June 7, 1994 (age 59 years), Ross-on-Wye, United Kingdom
Books: The Singing Detective, Karaoke and Cold Lazarus.]
GF: How did you first transmute into a writing career the despair you felt about your illness*, your departure from the Daily Herald and the end of your political ambitions?
DP: I remain sufficiently a Christian to know that despair is, in the old words, a very great sin. My first television play was called The Confidence Course, and I now understand, in retrospect, why and how it came about. It is really about the self-motivation courses run by bodies like the Dale Carnegie Institute, which I covered as a newspaper reporter at one of their so-called free sessions. The Herald wouldn’t use the article because Dale Carnegie was advertising in the paper.
A group of people gathered together in a hotel conference room – some of them were planted, I believe. The speakers were hustling and bustling people up to the front, where they’d let them speak for three minutes, then describe how they could have done it better, how they should impress people – standard pop psychology. They’d show you how to have a better memory by blindfolding someone who would recite a list of twenty objects they had just seen. I thought this was so theatrical – an attempt to pull certain types of social skills out of people -and phony. I was just there as an observer, because of the piece I was writing, but I could see it was like the chapel again, except that the chapel was about something. It used a series of vivid metaphors to give a perception of purpose, beauty and danger – they were perilous metaphors, too. What interested me was why those people were there, what sort of anxiety had brought them to that hotel. But something deeper was worrying me about it, and that was this so-called confidence factor. This was about self-functioning at a time when I was beginning to feel I couldn’t self-function. The people running it were saying, ‘We can give you confidence.’
GF: in The Confidence Course you invoke the
figure of the early nineteenth-century essayist William Hazlitt as a disruptive
stranger. I notice you refer to Hazlitt, perhaps more than any writer, in
interviews and conversation. It made me wonder if he was the most profound
influence on your own work.
DP: I think Hazlitt’s argumentative, springy, rhetorical essays represent
the peak of a certain kind of English prose. He was an odd combination of very
progressive- to the extent that we still haven’t caught up with him – and quite
reactionary. He would prefer an old book to a new book, an old thing to a new
thing; you also see that, though I think to a lesser degree, in someone like George
Orwell.
I am interested in the tension in oneself between the instinct that cherishes order, tradition and discipline, and what, in general terms, might be called a concatenation of right-wing emotions underneath or interlaced with radicalism, where your mind tells you other things. This tension – which I think is evident in Hazlitt and Orwell – is intrinsically dramatic, because it means you’re on your guard against the facile optimism and brutal idealism of the left, even though intellectually you respect and indeed share in it; at the same time, you pay due attention to the things that would normally be called ‘right-wing.’
Coleridge and Wordsworth made the journey within their own lives from an adulation of the French Revolution to a kind of High Toryism. And there is that element in the Conservative Party which I quite respect – that Old Tory, Dr. Johnson element, if you like, as opposed to the canting humbug of the left. Obviously, I could never bring myself to vote Conservative, and I suppose it would be accurate to say that I am on the left, but many of my feelings are what would commonly and crudely be called right-wing. Emotionally, I believe the greatest danger to the human race is lack of order. That doesn’t necessarily imply a sanctioning of hierarchies, but it does imply a belief in law. It’s complicated. I deliberately don’t write explicitly about politics because I prefer the tension between these two poles within myself – what in Marxist terms would be called a dialectic, I suppose – to be implicit. I don’t like political drama because I think the way to argue politics is through the essay or prose discourse. Obviously, your feelings and aspirations – social, religious and political – inform what you write. But I don’t think you should write on their behalf; you shouldn’t fly those flags.
GF: No, but all characters, because of their social background, their aspirations, are perforce political.
DP: Yes, they can be, but if you don’t set out to make them representatives or mouthpieces for this or that ideology or political stance, you retain the possibility of surprising yourself about how complicated they are. For example, the Denholm Elliott character – I suppose he is the villain- in Brimstone and Treacle is so far to the right that he has subscribed to the National Front. And yet, as I was writing him, he recoils when the idea of real evil, of the consequences of his thought, is put to him by the visitor, and in the act of recoiling manages to say things like, ‘All I want is the England I used to know . . . I just want it to be like it used to be.’
That sort of idiotic nostalgia has profound emotional springs for people, as you can see now with the break-up of the Soviet Union. It is too easy to dismiss those collections of feelings as stupidly right-wing or fascist. Human beings are more complicated than that; their aspirations are curiously entangled with the past and with this nostalgia.
GF: You’ve said that nostalgia is a second-order emotion. That implies that the past is inevitably a bitter or painful place.
DP: It’s not so much that it’s bitter or painful, because it’s also a very
funny and bitter place. The thing about it is that it isn’t necessarily behind
you, but can, if you turn the corner, be standing fully armed and implacable in
front of you. There’s an obsession with the minute-by-minute sensation, with
what you think you are now, but by definition ‘now’ is just the last few
seconds of decades of experience. Nostalgia is a means of forgetting the past,
of making it seem cozy, of saying, ‘It’s back there -look how sweet it was.’ But
you can use the power of nostalgia to open up the past and make it stand in
front of you. This is why I used popular songs. Often the initial reaction is,
‘Oh, how sweet to hear that thing again!’ but then the very syncopations can
bear in things that have been knocked away by the present and that are important,
that tell you what you are, why you are doing what you are doing, and why every
act that a person does has some sort of significance. The ripples never quite
die away.
*psoriatic arthropy, the hereditary illness he suffered from the age of twenty-six and which he bequeathed to Philip Marlow, the hospitalized hero of his masterpiece, The Singing Detective.
https://youtu.be/vI10_bFyqig?si=pUOhijtMACNiQIlq
