Vol. 17 No. 24 · 14 December 1995
pages 16-17 | 3961 words
Made for TV
Jenny Diski
- Fight & Kick & Bite: The Life and Work of Dennis Potter by W. Stephen Gilbert
Hodder, 382 pp, £18.99, November 1995, ISBN 0 340 64047 2
- Dennis Potter: A Life on Screen by John Cook
Manchester, 368 pp, £45.00, October 1995, ISBN 0 7190 4601 7
The death of Dennis Potter may have been authored by God, but it was adapted for television by Potter himself. It began after a brief report in the Guardian suggested that Potter’s terminal cancer related to his lifelong addiction to nicotine. By return there was a gleeful letter from Potter revelling in the Potteresque fact that far from his ‘beloved cigarettes’ being the culprits, his forthcoming death from pancreatic cancer was probably iatrogenic: the result of years of lethal medication. The Guardian letter assumed its readers knew that he had suffered all his adult life from psoriatic arthropathy, which, of course, they did. But tellingly, so did the readers of the Sun and the News of the World, who were more familiar with Potter as the‘Dirty Drama King’ and ‘Television’s Mr Filth’. Very few playwrights have had this kind of reach, and none has put it to such dramatic and manipulative use as Dennis Potter in his leavetaking broadcast to the nation. Though Potter was a Methodist, it was a final performance worthy of the archetypal Yiddisher momma having her guilt-laying, emotional-blackmailing finest hour. He may, as a lad, have gone three times every Sunday to a chapel called Salem, but it’s not for nothing that one of his plays was entitled Schmoedipus – as in the old Jewish joke, ‘Oedipus, schmoedipus, what does it matter so long as he loves his mother?’
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Letters
Vol. 18 No. 2 · 25 January 1996
From John Cook
Jenny Diski misrepresents me when she states that in my book, Dennis Potter: A Life on Screen, I offer a ‘vindication’ of derogatory stereotypes of woman as whore and as angel in Dennis Potter’s work (LRB, 14 December 1995). The problem with the ‘Potter and women’ question is that because we live in such a journalistic culture, most commentators assess the writer’s female characters in terms of naturalistic criteria – i.e. of how far they fall short of being ‘real’ women. Potter, however, was less interested in realistic characterisation than in exploring how men project their own flawed fantasies and feelings onto women. In interview, he told me he used to laugh when critics said certain of his characters were tending to caricature: ‘What the fuck – they were caricatures to start with!’ he chuckled. Particularly in his early career, his female figures functioned as mere ciphers: projections of the inner anxieties of a troubled male protagonist who was the real ‘problem’ addressed by the plays. Nor, I think, did the writer simply acquiesce in conventional stereotypes – as Jenny Diski accuses. Instead, these became the very problem, an inherited problem, which his writing attempted to explore and overcome as it progressed. By the time of Blackeyes, what we see is him trying, in his own very narrow way, to show how badly men treat women and to acknowledge his own male complicity in the process. That was his big mistake – because it left him open to the charge that, far from a wider issue of society, the problem was simply a personal one of his. As the product of a particular generation and culture (not to mention the trauma of sexual abuse), Potter inevitably did have his problems with women but what I find interesting about his work is that as it developed, he did not simply accept this but tried to struggle against it. Alas, however, not many others, it seems, want to see the artistic flux.
John Cook
Denny, Stirlingshire
