1993
[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
