This essay by Nathalie Olah, commissioned for Hilary Lloyd, Very High Frequency, examines the legacy of writer Dennis Potter and academic Richard Hoggart, two figures who resisted the British cultural establishment's patronising view of the working class.
Two men who left an indelible mark on the British postwar imagination were the academic and public intellectual Richard Hoggart, and the screenwriter and director Dennis Potter. Both travelled from their working-class communities in the provinces to the very heart of the British cultural establishment. Hoggart migrated from the outskirts of Leeds, Potter the Forest of Dean. Something about that journey meant they were both scathing of the cultural orthodoxies created by the corporate media, and in particular, the ways in which the latter portrayed the working poor. Hoggart distilled its patronising reflexes when he referred to the ‘folksy ballyhoo of the Sunday columnists’. A group, he wrote, that ‘always remember[ed] to quote with admiration the latest bon mot of their pub-pal ‘Alf’’ [1].
The line might have been taken from one of Potter’s own plays for all the sly mockery that it contains, and the syntactic snark and the smushing of registers. Certainly, there are no Alfs in Potter’s universe. What Hoggart defined as an Orwellian invention, rooted in the tradition of the noble savage, resigned to his fate and always happy to doff his cap at you, was turned entirely on its head by Potter’s pen. Here, in the worlds of Pennies from Heaven (1978), Brimstone and Treacle (1976/1987), The Singing Detective (1986), and many more besides, are the very antitheses of Alf: horribly sinister men, bitter to their core, bad-tempered, mean-spirited and, as such, funnier than almost anyone else in popular television. They charmed and horrified the British public in equal measure, filling polite CofE homes with nightmarish visions of everything they’d brushed under the carpet.
Before encountering Potter, I assumed repression was the entire point of art. For those of us unaccustomed to the lifestyles that fit neatly into the popular painting or novel, its reasonable to assume that both are meant to have an improving function, cleaning up reality up in two ways: first, by what they contain, which was always more polished and deliberate than anything I recognised from life; and second, by exposing us to certain, more feted lives, unlocking a sense of aspiration. I might have continued to think in that way had it not been for a teacher, drunk or insane perhaps, who gave us a copy of Potter’s play, Blue Remembered Hills (1979). After that, I realised art could be a vehicle for our baser instincts, and that without them in fact, it might be nothing more than a kind of decoration, or propaganda.
That play is about a group of kids who commit a murder, burning someone to death during a summer afternoon in the Forest of Dean. We also watched the TV adaptation at school, originally broadcast by the BBC, in which the children were played by adult actors. I think all of us were sick but slightly titillated by what the brutal ending said about our own nervy gatherings in the park next door — a place where sex and violence always threatened to disturb the pristine flower beds that had been installed by the council.
We repeated lines from the play on our lunch breaks and between classes. The gaze had shifted to accommodate a new set of suspicions, as we looked past each other’s acne scars to try and guess at the strange desires lurking underneath.
A few years later, I watched The Singing Detective on a DVD player plugged into the back of a boyfriend’s TV. It made similar critiques as Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy (1957), which opposed the cheap, easy and stupefying effects of a mass media model. Where Hoggart used polemic, Potter thwarted viewers’ expectations through strange, Brechtian narrative techniques — characters that suddenly broke into song or started babbling nonsensically, fourth walls being dismantled and then reassembled just as fast. It follows the story of Phillip Marlow (Michael Gambon), a writer of detective fiction who is hospitalised with a terrible skin condition and spends his time in bed imagining scenes for his next story. Between these imaginative wanderings are flashbacks from his childhood in the Forest of Dean. It was not just this geographical detail that led audiences to assume the show was partly autobiographical, but the fact that Marlow also suffered from the same debilitating skin condition as Potter — psoriatic arthropathy. Potter’s case was so bad that his arms were usually covered and he was often limited in the use of his hands.
The Singing Detective is not a naturalistic portrayal of illness (Potter’s preferred term was non-naturalism), but mimetic of the altered state caused by some chronic conditions and types of medication. There’s an argument for reading Potter as a disabled artist (though he never used the term himself), and by that reading, we might ask if the natural mode isn’t inherently ableist. We’re obsessed with things being ‘gratuitous’ in Britain. We might even ask ourselves if the formal transgressions in Potter’s work are gratuitous, but that would put us, the audience or the commentators, in a position of deciding what is right or normal. This is what the corporate media gaze does, it homogenizes and reinforces certain conventions. By all of those conventional measures, Potter’s work was experimental — yes — but that doesn’t mean that it wasn’t also very realistic about the painful contradictions that underscored the lives of its characters.
As the journalist Fergal Kinney has written: ‘[Potter] is a remnant of a high-minded and irretrievable moment in British public art, when complex and politically daring work was broadcast to a mass audience’ [2]. It’s lamentable that today’s broadcasting standards are more conservative than they were in the 1970s and 1980s, and not just because of what that conservatism limits in terms of spectacle, but because of the critiques that are only possible by breaking said forms. We know that David Lynch was a great admirer of Potter’s work. The academic Mark Fisher has written an essay on both, critiquing Potter’s dancehall scenes in The Singing Detective against the Club Silencio scene in Lynch’s Mullholland Drive (2001) [3]. The settings are comparable, but the observations made by the two directors differ in one crucial way. If Lynch is concerned with the slipperiness of cinema, its tendency to mislead us, and what this might mean for the nation of America more broadly, which was not much older than its cinematic tradition; then for Potter the concern is for the fundamental incompatibility of that American screen culture with a Britishness that long predates it.
The Singing Detective is about an entertainment machine that starts to malfunction when it comes into contact with a world of both physical pain, but also the communities built to manage and alleviate that pain. Marlow never quite masters his chosen genre of detective fiction, and not because he doesn’t know how, but because committing to it would mean abandoning the people he reluctantly adores. It’s a metaphor for Potter’s own career. Marlow’s noirs are drenched in, and undermined by, the bounty of a two-week holiday to Benidorm; cloak and dagger encounters made ridiculous by glamour pusses who like their wine sweet and from the box, gums slightly stained from the smoke of too many Benson & Hedges.
If that sounds slightly sexist then it is, in places. What starts off in a more tongue-in-cheek vein in shows like The Singing Detective, where the dual character of Mrs Marlow/Lili (Alison Steadman) is elsewhere sensitively portrayed and well-developed, give way to stereotyping in his later work. Some attempts to portray misogynistic men fail to avoid a similar fate themselves, such as Blackeyes (1989), which was based on a novel of the same name by Potter, whose eponymous female lead (Gina Bellman) is portrayed as a one-dimensional cut-out. She is vacant, cold and ripe for exploitation. Potter was hurt by the accusations of misogyny, which shouldn’t be relevant to our interpretation, but does nevertheless tell us about the wide gulf that often existed between his intentions and the audience’s reception. In his last interview with Melvyn Bragg, which took place in the weeks before Potter’s death from cancer and meant that he was required to drink liquid morphine between the glasses of champagne that he liked to quaff (an affectation that he developed in later life), he said of Blackeyes:
‘It was a piece about alienation… What I specifically wanted to show is what the Marxists call reification — the way that people are turned into things, and by what is both the oldest and, in some sense, the newest ruling class: men. The way they have so consistently used women in advertising, in fiction, in drama, in real life most importantly of all, as sexual commodities and things.’ [4]
He goes on to acknowledge the flaw in this plan, which is that he was also a man of course, and one who had not been spared from the patriarchy’s clutches. Potter was accused of having used or mistreated the women that he worked with, including strange behaviour in casting processes, doing test readings in hotel rooms and becoming obsessed with certain young actresses. We know that Potter suffered child sexual abuse, and we know that many salacious and untrue claims were also made about him by the British press. These were often motivated not by a desire to uncover Potter’s actual treatment of women, or their depiction in his work, but to satisfy a prurient culture that hated sex workers and wanted to discredit anyone who wanted to humanise them (as Potter did) [5].
Untangling all of this is challenging and maybe impossible. We are left with several questions: Did Potter simply speak the British subconscious into being, giving voice to urges and desires that our Christian conservative tradition had denied? Was he punished for this by the press, which was inherently conservative and misogynist? Or are we, the people who enjoy his work today, the ones who are guilty of repression and turning a blind eye to the concerning aspects of a life in order to keep Potter’s legacy alive?
Is it possible that we could answer yes to both and arrive at an answer that avoids moral absolutes?
Brimstone and Treacle was first commissioned by the BBC in 1976 but was not shown for another eleven years, due to what British broadcasters at the time considered to be its immorality (Fisher claims that it was only shown because of how successful The Singing Detective had been). It famously contains a scene in which Pattie (Michelle Newell), a woman with severe disabilities, is raped by Martin (Michael Kitchen). Martin is the physical incarnation of the devil, who appears one day at Pattie’s family home claiming to be a college friend. Pattie is so injured by an earlier car accident that she has lost the ability to speak or move.
This is the most extreme example of what the cultural critic Dominic Fox has referred to as the ‘recurring figure of inarticulate victimhood’ [6] in Potter’s work — or as Potter himself put it in his 1993 McTaggart lecture, the ones ‘who cannot talk at all’ [7]. I share none of the concerns held by the conservative and pearl-clutching media types towards the basic premise of Brimstone, only for Potter’s decision to conclude his story with Pattie being ‘cured’ by her rape. It is a wild and truly daring thing to have written. Potter defended the decision in his interview with Bragg, claiming that he only ever wanted to challenge certain Christian ideas, and to suggest that piety had never come to the rescue of the abject and infirm. That’s not clear from the film or a particularly persuasive argument, however. Where Brimstone does succeed though, is in its depiction of the National Front and its ability to tempt Pattie’s underpaid and neglected carers, who find solace in its jingoism and hatred of the Other.
In Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, Claire Dederer [8] asks whether it is ever possible to redeem the work of bad men (and less commonly, bad women). I don’t know how neatly Potter fits that description, or if I even like it, but there is something to be gained from considering his work in the light of Dederer’s book. Though I love it, Monsters has always contained one flaw, in my opinion, in that it fails to acknowledge the absurdity of celebrity and fandoms in general. When reading it, I kept asking myself if people would face the same dilemma over men who performed any other kind of work. Unlike the doctor, lawyer or plumber, the artist — by producing stories, pictures, songs or film, which are themselves, rather than their material effect, capable of inducing certain emotions — seems to possess a kind of magic. In the secular, western, and dare I say it, American tradition, this produces a kind of idolatry.
One of the reasons I believe Potter’s work might be spared from moral absolutes, is that he and his work were specifically against such a cult of personality. Like Hoggart, Potter’s attitude seemed to suggest a belief that ‘the genius’ was just another effect of American consumerism. If we take him at his word, writing was a vocation for Potter, the type of which his father, a pit worker, never had the chance to discover. Potter gives thanks to the Post-War Consensus for this, and the reforms that were initially implemented by the Labour government under Clement Attlee. Though it was an imperfect solution for the working-class in general, a grammar school education (and a stint at Oxford) were treasured by Potter, not for the fame and success that they bought him, but because of what they offered in measures of self-determination and most importantly, choice.
The labour component of art seems to have been much more apparent when work itself, the power dynamics and remuneration were the subject of news reporting and public debate, as they were in the 1970s and 80s. Potter was no Wizard of Oz figure, a genius worthy of veneration, but a bloke who made TV. He made it well of course, much like a craftsman, or artisan.
Today, his plays are out of print and his TV shows are spread inconsistently across the internet, none of them the subject of a revivalist programme by the major art house cinemas or streaming platforms. That’s a pity, because what they can tell us about our transformation from citizens into passive consumers, is interesting. Potter’s films were never complicit in that transformation. They did not participate in the stultification of our screens, but tried, against hope, to resist it. For that alone, they should be remembered.
Hilary Lloyd, Very High Frequency, is supported by Kvadrat.
Lead Programme Supporters: The Ampersand Foundation, Shane Akeroyd and Sadie Coles HQ, London. Supported by a National Lottery Project Grant from Arts Council England and The Studio Voltaire Council. With additional support from Brian Boylan and Raven Row, London.
Studio Voltaire’s 2025-2026 exhibition programme is supported by Cockayne Grants for the Arts.
Nathalie Olah is an author with an interest in visual culture and subaltern aesthetics. Her books include Bad Taste (Dialogue Books, 2023) an exploration of the intersection between consumerism, class, desire and power; Sarah Lucas: Happy Gas (Tate Publishing, 2023) and Steal as much as you can (Repeater Books, 2019). Her writing has been published widely in periodicals including ArtReview, The Guardian, Tribune, Jacobin and The Times Literary Supplement.
Alan Yenton interviews Dennis Potter, Arena, 1987. 61min, film still. With thanks to BBC Archives
