Remembering Dennis Potter Through Fans, Extras and Archives

J. Garde-Hansen, H. Grist

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137349293
• eBook ISBN: 9781137349309
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Art General

An accessible case study of television heritage, Remembering Dennis Potter Through Fans, Extras and Archive draws on the memories of fans and extras of Potter's productions. In providing insight into issues of visibility, memory and television production, it fulfils a vital need for better understanding of television production history as heritage.

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Potted Potter: The Impact of Dennis Potter Locally, Nationally and Internationally

Abstract: This chapter advances the understanding of Potter’s work and its impact in regional terms beyond the work of John Cook (1998, 2000), Glen Creeber (1998) and W. Stephen Gilbert (1995). In updating the Potter legacy, this chapter investigates the relationship between his television productions in the Forest of Dean and audiences at home and in the United States. It begins by considering underexamined production processes (such as the use of extras and location scouts). By showing the reader just how and by what means local people became involved in television production, this chapter begins to map the impact of Potter’s work. This sets the scene for the primary research of the following chapters that each creates stories and memories that illuminate the impact of media upon lives and communities.

Keywords: television; history; Dennis Potter; heritage; The Signing Detective

Garde-Hansen, Joanne and Hannah Grist. Remembering Dennis Potter Through Fans, Extras and Archives. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. DOI: 10.1057/9781137349309.0006.

International ‘Potter’ and scholarly inheritance

Dennis Potter and his work have been ‘potted’ so to speak in two ways, with ‘popular’ published versions of ‘the man’ (filtered uncritically through reference to his more controversial television texts) in conflict with authoritative and scholarly versions of the creative genius setting the standards of drama. As academics, we will be drawing more upon how our research contributes new knowledge to the latter, while offering a framework for putting the former into perspective. The publications by Cook (1998), Fuller (1993), Stead (1993), Gilbert (1995), Creeber (1998) and the collected essays edited by Gras and Cook (2000) fairly represent the concentrated first wave of substantial research of Potter’s works. The research in this first wave (mostly by male scholars¹) on the creative output from 1957 to 1994 unsurprisingly focuses on Potter’s television work. This was seen as the Golden Age of television: transforming, testing the limits of expression, moving towards both de-regulation and the increased financial accountability of the BBC.² In his most recent reflections upon Potter (as part of what we would like to call a second wave of Potter scholarship), his producer Kenith Trodd re-iterates a construction of the writer as torn between solitary creativity and ‘the collaborative industrial environment’ of British media. That is, television in the 1960s during a ‘climate of unaccustomed liberality’ (2013, 221–222).

The first wave of scholarship on Potter established this inheritable tension between the creative genius of the auteur figure and the necessary collaboration, costs and creative rights involved to translate Potter’s creativity onto small and later big screens. In the background of this scholarship are the politicised concepts of quality and the cultural value of television, and this may obscure what audiences, fans and non-professional experts of Potter consider important to inherit. That is, in remembering Potter’s work in this way there is a danger of reducing what is inheritable, what is ‘valuable’ to remember, to a ‘collective memory’ of the politics of television at a particular period of time. Thus, by using ‘memory’ as method this book records, reconstructs and remembers that which mainstream scholarship of Potter’s work forgets: the seemingly trivial, the social, the unexpected, the anecdotal and the happenstance personal archives of non-professionals. This is a markedly different task, drawing upon a different set of theories and methods, and contributes another approach to the second wave.

Representative of a particular period of television scholarship, however, research of audiences and production have been generally absent, corrected (in part) by the Journal of Screenwriting’s 25th Anniversary of The Singing Detective (1986). Here attention to creative practitioners and screen producers is paid: Peter Bowker, Jonathan Powell, Kenith Trodd, Jon Amiel and Keith Gordon. While, we would not expect this particular journal to attend to audiences, it seems a shame that research of audience memories of The Singing Detective are not captured at this anniversary. In part, this is because audience memory research is a relatively new area of study but mostly it is because Potter’s landmark series has been perceived (by viewers) to ‘belong’ to scholars rather than audiences (or so our research discovered). Potter’s audience is though referred to as ‘interactive’ (Creeber 2013, 252) and Trodd repeats Potter’s oft-cited position on television as a medium of possibility and potentiality (of becoming): ‘that could slice through all the tedious hierarchies of the printed word and help to emancipate us from many if [sic] these stifling tyrannies of class and status and gutter-press ignorance’ (Potter 1992, cited by Trodd 2013, 222). Thus, it seems timely to research Potter’s audiences and those who interacted with the production of his work not as part of an ongoing professional identity, but as fans, lay experts, extras and young local actors.

When production research was drawn upon in the first wave of scholarship it was through selected interviews with production staff, references to the BBC Written Archives and most notably in the final chapter from Trodd: ‘Whose Dennis is it Anyway?’ in Gras and Cook’s (2000) collection. Here, it seems that legacy is implicitly re-valued by Trodd as a ‘production’ right to remember over a scholarly right to critique. To Trodd, the previous 14 chapters of the ‘International Collected Essays’ present the problem of remembering television while forgetting the underlying economics of legacy. To whom does remembering belong: scholars, producers, the Literary Estate, the BBC/ITV or the audience?

‘Whose Dennis is it Anyway?’ is a fair and wry enough question to raise, not offensively, at the end of a collection, most of whose contributors cannot have met him nor been involved with his work firsthand. Was Potter his work or does his work amount to Potter? (2000, 231)

Ending with the paradox of the relationship between critique and creativity, the relationship between the whole and the part, Trodd asks us to consider what is essential to remember: media production or its creative force, relationships or texts? Who has access to television’s past: the direct witness, the producer, the creative talent, the researcher and where, we would add, is the audience to be positioned?

Nevertheless, the last and only scholarly collection in book form, Gras and Cook’s (2000) collection acknowledges the ‘affective’ dimensions of media research as a ‘passion’ for Potter. The necessity of scholarly transmission was a match to Potter’s intensive cultural transmission during his lifetime. It continues to be widely acknowledged that he was a prolific writer by most screenwriter’s standards during his career (see Gras and Cook 2000, 95; Ganz’s interview with Jon Amiel 2013) and it was clearly ‘felt’ that Potter was in danger of being forgotten, or at least, only being remembered for a few ‘memorable’ television texts, some rows with management, a warts-and-all biography and that final interview with Melvyn Bragg. Passion does not always mean that scholarship is inclusive of all possible perspectives, and the focus on Potter’s authorship should not overshadow the equally important cultural investment that numerous stakeholders invested in his work. Nor should it overlook the fact that to remember and recall television is a social and cultural act in the present that necessarily involves a very wide range of social and cultural actors. It becomes less a case of remembering television right and more about reflecting upon the right to remember television in ways meaningful (and valuable) to stakeholders.

Consequently, in Gras and Cook’s introduction to their collection they make a heartfelt plea to Potter’s Estate and his agent Judy Daish (who they believe are reeling from the controversial posthumous biography by Carpenter³):

As editors, however with our ‘own’ passion for Potter, we would like to end by making a strong appeal to the estate that it is only through a concerted effort to make his TV plays available to the general public (for example, on video) that a truer, more rounded picture of the writer will emerge, and his reputation be secured for posterity. Without greater public access to his material, the current wave of interest in him will surely fade away and then, Potter really will die and be forgotten. (Gras and Cook 2000, 9)

Access can be couched in epistemological terms as moral, ethical and cultural value determinants of creative output part financed by public funds through the BBC, which would improve public understanding (beyond the internalised sentiments of a tabloid press). In this framework, television’s legacy also pertains to the value that academics and experts ascribe to the artefacts of cultural production. However, access costs, and it is the underlying economies of making television into accessible heritage that any legacy has to take into account.

This accords with The Popular Memory Group (1979–1980) who met at the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) for a brief period but whose own legacy (along with the ‘CCCS’) continues to have purchase in mediated economies of remembering television. They defined popular memory as one such ‘dimension of political practice’ whereby institutions produce the ‘ordinary’. Alongside museums, the National Trust, the National Theatre, galleries, record offices and academics, they note the field of history as ‘cultural policy’:

In this cultural field, the relations between scholarly and dominant historiographies are especially intimate; the historian’s criteria of truthfulness are more likely to prevail here than in more overtly politicized versions. (Popular Memory Group 2011, 255)

The painstaking memory work and emotional labour in researching a television auteur when the archives work against remembering cannot be underestimated. Potter scholars (like many television scholars) have had to work exceptionally hard at gathering the evidence from texts, industry documents, tapes, interviews, letters, manuscripts, ephemera and artefacts. Moreover, there is a cost benefit to this labour and in a review of Cook’s Dennis Potter: A Life on Screen (the second edition of 1998 published the year of the Carpenter biography), a dialectics of inheritance was observable:

Though Cook frankly admires Potter, and his work, the book is not just a celebration. His vicious condemnation of Carpenter’s biography, before that book was published, is unnecessarily defensive and at odds with the reasoned tone of the book as a whole. It sounds as if ‘ownership’ of Potter’s legacy is being claimed. (Simpson 1999, 225)

This point is one that certainly emerged in our research of the memories evoked by the movement of the Potter’s written archive from London (back) to the Forest of Dean. Scholars and television experts have the power to direct heritage in a range of possible directions (we include ourselves in this statement) and lay experts were keen to ‘own’ that legacy. In self-recognising this discursive and epistemological power from the outset, our approach was led by lay expertise in remembering Potter. Lay opinions (in their diversity, creativity and richness) and the Estate as Rights holder of Potter’s work (a necessary gate-keeping role) are influenced by what we will term repertoires of mediated memories that come as much from the audience as from producers and scholars. In the case of Potter, these repertoires consisted of television interviews, journalism, editorials, biographies and auteur studies. It is the multidirectionality of these mediated memory discourses that make Potter contentious and (un)inheritable through entirely scholarly frameworks. It is for these reasons that the following chapters present our ‘inventive methods’ as Lury and Wakeford (2012) define them for remembering Potter. Through media, archive, anecdote and artefact as methods, we address directly the problem of remembering and forgetting by affectively engaging with the social in order to inherit past television.

In the emerging second wave of Potter scholarship, instigated by memory studies rather than television history (of which this short book is a small part), we can see that the first wave of scholarship translated very well internationally and this has been important in underpinning the case for making Potter’s work historically important. Thus, most recently the US television critic David Bianculli (2013) has compiled with historical detail the ‘life and works of the TV auteur Dennis Potter’ from an American perspective based on three aspects: the patchy history of US broadcasts of his television plays, the 1992 visit of Potter and Trodd to New York’s Museum of Television and Radio and the interviews that surrounded the US trip. Bianculli mixes archival material, production memories and a fresh interview with the museum curator Ron Simon.

The special issue of the Journal of Screenwriting mentioned earlier dovetails with both the Dennis Potter Heritage Project and the possibility of any future BFI commemorations. Again, as the most remembered series Stateside, The Singing Detective (1986) is an important text to showcase for British television’s international and national heritage. While Potter’s work is not reducible to The Singing Detective (1986) it is the series that has lodged in the collective memory of the industry (and audiences in the United Kingdom, United States and Australia). Here, then, collective memory is business because it is popular, remembered and intertextually referred to by directors and screenwriters who draw upon past television for inspiration. With numerous debates online regarding the adaptation of the series into the film, it is seen as the most valuable as an export and, as noted by Jon Amiel (Ganz 2013), it is the one television text that instils admiration in the United States when people find out he directed it.

The scholars with articles in the 2013 anniversary edition of the journal (Cook, Creeber, Rolinson 2013) also take stock of their research to date at the Dennis Potter Heritage Project celebratory event in the Forest of Dean (29 June 2013), alongside both authors of this book. Taken historically, the second wave of scholarly activity looks like a response to the ‘plea’ being met by the Estate and Potter’s agent. The Estate had made the written archive available for purchase, waited until it was purchasable by a UK buyer and seemingly encouraged its return to the Forest and is (at the time of writing) in the process of being made public. His daughter Sarah Potter’s statement to BBC regional television news on 29 June 2013 (‘Unseen Dennis Potter works on display in Forest of Dean’) that her father had ‘overall a tender and affectionate relationship’ to the Forest of Dean allows the archive to be re-imagined as returned ‘home’ through an emotional register. Approached mnemonically, the inheritability of Potter’s written archive is very much dependent upon a complex mix of entrepreneurialism, community, region, audience, family and personal memories. The mediatisation of that inheritability seeks to ensure any pain or trauma associated with past public sentiment around Potter (the man) be worked through in the present for ‘collective benefit’. The return of the archive and the attention it creates produce a space for dialogue around the controversial issues in his works and some kind of reconciliation with the portrayal/betrayal of region. It is this we have addressed through our social and participatory methods in the following chapters in order to have some renewed understanding of the economies of remembering television as heritage.

Remembering Potter in Place

Our approach moves closer to the production practices and technologies of a mnemonic imagination that is creatively reinserting key stakeholders back into television history. This does not in any way assume that we are much closer to objectively understanding the practices of television production outside the cultural and economic value systems of institutions, any more than an analysis of written television archives or a textual analysis of the content would. As we shall show in the next chapter both Trodd and Amiel are professional rememberers with years of experience of performing industrially reflexive discourses as fundamental to their own ongoing value as directors and producers of television and film. To be associated with Potter has continuing value for his former collaborators (socially, culturally and economically), as long as Potter’s heritage is carefully managed through strategies of remembering and forgetting that sustain and maintain that value. Thus, we have been able to use ‘archive as method’ for creating new opportunities for remembering Potter’s work in places of production often ignored in television scholarship (the rural) and by different memory agents (e.g. extras).⁴

In the following sections we unpack the impact of Potter spatially rather than chronologically. Here we do not focus on studios because place and region are more important to the cultural identities we worked with. In Fuller’s (1993) book, Potter is usefully dealt with thematically, which sets it apart from other works. It is easier to divide Potter into temporal phases or stages, either by biography or by filmography. Bianculli (2013) for example is able to separate Potter in America into three periods but in our approach we privilege memory over history. Thus, the spatial approach affords a move away from historicity and towards a mnemonic understanding that allows us to tackle the relationship between his production of memory and imagination in a mediated present. It also forces us to engage with the pl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: Television as Heritage
• 1  Potted Potter: The Impact of Dennis Potter Locally, Nationally and Internationally
• 2  Archiving Potter: Memory and Television Production
• 3  Potters Extras: Below-the-Line Production Memories
• 4  Potters Fans: From Hyperlocal to International Fandom
• Conclusion: Economies of Remembering Television
• References
• Index