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- This is the first of Dennis Potter's adaptations from Thomas Hardy (1840-1928). It aired on WESSEX TALES, a BBC2 series devoted to Hardy dramatizations. Hardy was born in Dorsetshire, an area he called Wessex in his writings, including WESSEX POEMS (1898). As in the original short story, two brothers attained respectable positions, but then feel they must do something about their father's lowly status. Five years later, Potter did a BBC2 miniseries adaptation of Hardy's 1886 novel, THE MAYOR OF CASTERBRIDGE.
- Written for THE WEDNESDAY PLAY (1964-70), which the BBC retitled PLAY FOR TODAY in 1970, ALICE has the earliest airdate (10/13/65) of the Potter productions to survive on tape. After THE CONFIDENCE COURSE (1965), it's the second of the nine Potter plays seen on THE WEDNESDAY PLAY. In this look at Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832-1898), aka Lewis Carroll, Potter mixed biographical drama with a psychological profile to explore the roots of Dodgson's creativity. Dodgson tells stories to ten-year-old Alice Liddell, leading to recreations of scenes adapted from ALICE'S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND (1865), designed to resemble the original Sir John Tenniel illustrations.
- In HBO's one-hour follow-up film, footage of the Loud family in 1983 is intercut with scenes from PBS' original 1973 An American Family documentary series. This HBO film was not aired on PBS until 1991.
- For the BBC's WEDNESDAY PLAY series, Dennis Potter offered one of his "visitation dramas": Housewife Cynthia Nicholls is married to prudish Richard Nicholls. One day, her mundane household chores are interrupted by the arrival on her front step of scruffy, coarse Michael Biddle. He claims to be an angel, but on the face of it, he could simply be a deranged street person. She challenges the angel Michael by pointing out that he has no wings.
- After a brief tutelage with innovative BBC documentary producer Denis Mitchell, Dennis Potter teamed with producer Anthony de Lotbiniere to film a documentary (later described by David Niven as "absolutely wonderful"). Returning to the Berry Hill roots of his childhood, Potter used interviews with locals (including his parents) to show changes in the working-class traditions of the Forest of Dean, where "the green forest has a deep black heart beneath its sudden hills, pushing up slag heaps and gray little villages clustering around the coal."
- Blackeyes is an attempt to explore "what does go on between men and women in their heads, to show the possibilities of the ways that they see each other." Complex and multi-layered, the interweaving narrative threads include novelist Maurice James Kingsley who appropriates accounts by his niece Jessica about her life as a professional model. Kingsley's embellishments become a trashy bestseller, "Sugar Bush," tracing the rise and decline of fictional fashion model Blackeyes, victimized by men. Angry and betrayed, Jessica begins to rewrite Kingsley's novel to set Blackeyes free from the abuse of men.
- "When we dream of childhood," said Dennis Potter, "we take our present selves with us. It is not the adult world writ small; childhood is the adult world writ large." Since Potter viewed childhood as "adult society without all the conventions and the polite forms which overlay it," he repeated the device he had introduced 14 years earlier (in "Stand Up, Nigel Barton"); children's roles were cast with adult actors in this naturalistic memory drama of a "golden day" that turns to tragedy. On a sunny, summer afternoon in bucolic England of 1943, seven West Country children (two girls, five boys) play in the Forest of Dean. Their games and spontaneous actions (continuous and in real time) reflect their awareness of WWII, but no adults are present to intrude. As the group moves through the woods and back to the grassy hills, their words and actions illustrate how "childhood is not transparent with innocence." When the two girls push a pram into a barn to play house, the casting concept is heightened, doubling back on itself in a remarkable moment: adults are suddenly seen to be acting as children who are pretending to be adults, and lines from Housman echo across the years: "That is the land of lost content/I see it shining plain/The happy highways where I went/And cannot come again."
- Described by "Radio Times" as "a kaleidoscope from the world of books," this Sunday afternoon BBC series featured book reviews, interviews and dramatized excerpts, scripted by Dennis Potter, from both contemporary books and classics. Although Potter's title was Script Associate, he provided "ideas" and script outlines and wrote the finished scripts. Potter also conducted interviews with Francis Chichester, Edward Hyams, James Morris and Francis Newton. His drama sequences included Henry James' "The Turn of the Screw," Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World," Dashiell Hammett's "The Glass Key," Iris Murdoch's "Under the Net," Kingsley Amis' "That Uncertain Feeling," Stan Barstow's "A Kind of Loving" and Colin MacInnes' "Absolute Beginners."
- Live dramatic plays presented in the round with minimal props, scenery and costumes.
- Daniel Grudge, a wealthy industrialist and fierce isolationist long embittered by the loss of his son in World War II, is visited by three ghosts on Christmas Eve who lead him to reconsider his attitude toward his fellow man.
- While he is in prison, Giacomo Casanova recalls many of his past romances and adventures.
- An English girl marries a German lawyer in the 1930s and they try to live as normal a life as they can in Hitler's Germany. When Allied bombs start falling on German cities, Christabel takes her two young sons to a village in the mountains. Then she learns that her husband and some of his friends have been arrested for plotting to assassinate Hitler. She travels to the prison where he is held, wondering if telling the commandant that she knows Winston Churchill will help her husband or seal his fate. This is said to be based on a true story.
- Writer Daniel Feeld, first seen in Dennis Potter's "Karaoke," returns three centuries later as a disembodied head.
- Past and present intertwine: An elderly couple returns to the hotel where they became close when they were young and flashbacks to the earlier visit reveal the origins of both their pleasures and problems. Somewhere between the past and the present, Dennis Potter attempted to find "the shape of a life, of two lives..."
- Interviews in the Michael Moore/"Roger and Me" tradition examine life in small-town America, class conflicts and the collapse of an upstate New York community, Dadetown, when the town's once-prosperous factory, reduced to the manufacture of paper clips and staples, finally closes. Facing massive unemployment, the blue-collar Dadetown residents next find yuppies moving into town to staff the local division of a big computer outfit.
- Documentary details the life and career of writer Dennis Potter.
- Dennis Potter's meta commentary on scriptwriting, as Helen meets writer Martin Ellis in a hotel bar to help with his writer's block. Also there is Carol, an escort girl with her client. But are they real, or merely Martin's imaginings?
- Employing experimental techniques, Emshwiller magically moved through a collection of objects and artifacts in order to capture the spirit of George Dumpson and his backyard museum, as he noted: "George Dumpson was a scavenger. He created a small universe with what he found and could carry on his homemade wagon. To me he epitomized the soul of the artist. He put together what things he could in such a way as to satisfy some inner need, just as I had to make this picture of him and his place."
- The highlights of the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival.
- The religious beliefs of pet shop owner Joe (Freddie Jones) are shaken by the terminal illness of his daughter Lucy (Angharad Rees). For Potter, this play "makes more than a wry nod at possibilities which can comprehend pain, or disgust, or the implacable presence of death itself."
- Daniel Feeld is a screenwriter with pains in his gut and a new screenplay called "Karaoke", about a girl named Sandra who works in a seedy Karaoke bar and is murdered by a lowlife named Arthur "Pig" Mallion. But whenever Daniel looks around, real people seem to be speaking his dialogue in real situations that mirror the script, including a beautiful young girl named Sandra who works in a Karaoke bar owned by a Mr. Mallion. Meanwhile, Balmer, the film's director, is in a spot of trouble with the film's leading lady.
- Angus Wilson (1913-1991) wrote his novel "Late Call" in 1964, and 20 years later, Anthony Burgess ranked it as one of the 99 best novels written since 1939. This led to its inclusion in the rec.arts.books compilation list of the 425 "Greatest Books of All Time." The central character is the elderly Sylvia Calvert, and Wilson wanted to "find a way of suggesting the absurd and the compassionate at the same time in Sylvia's story," and with her son, "the sudden, incidental and completely horrible in the deadly respectable world." Adapting Wilson's novel into four episodes (each approximately 50 minutes in length), Dennis Potter expanded Wilson's prologue ("The Hot Summer of 1911") into the drama's centerpiece, intercutting between past and present as he probed spiritual desolation in the English Midlands. Retiring from a lifetime of hotel domestic service, Sylvia Calvert arrives with her husband Arthur to live with their overly fastidious son in the New Town of Carshall, where they attempt to adjust to the lifestyle of his family. Amid the alienation and the passivity of the dull and deadening retirement, Sylvia escapes into her repressed memories, looking back at the year 1911 and reflecting on the psychological wound of a long-ago incident from her childhood.
- Dennis Potter used his own background as a Russian language clerk in the War Office when writing this play for ITV's SATURDAY NIGHT THEATRE series. At the time of the 1956 Suez Crisis and the Russian invasion of Hungary, Private Bob Hawk reports to the London Intelligence Office where the strength of Soviet troops is under scrutiny.
- 7 men work in a military intelligence office in 1956 London. Hopper is bored translating Russian and imagines rock'n'roll musicals set in the office. Francis dreams of Berry's wife.
- A biography of the 18-century Viennese physician Franz Anton Mesmer, who used unorthodox healing practices based on his theory of "animal magnetism."
- American producer James Boyce and his airhead wife Amber rent an English country mansion where the British horror flick "Smoke Rings" was filmed twenty years previous. Amber's mother was model-actress Mandy Mason, who died mysteriously after her appearance in "Smoke Rings." The property rental to Boyce was arranged by middle-aged lawyer Henry Harris, who continues to live with his lovesick memories of the late actress. Boyce invites Harris to dinner, and "Smoke Rings" airs on TV that same evening. During the following days, Harris observes Amber's schizophrenic behavior veering parallel to events once experienced by her mother and also to the movie's plotline.
- Writing for ITV Saturday Night Theatre (1969), Dennis Potter introduced the notion that popular music expresses the yearning of the human spirit for a better world. A troubled young man, David Peters (Ian Holm), claims, "Once dreams were possible, that's what the popular songs told us." Rejecting rock music of the day, Peters is immersed in the tunes of Thirties crooner Al Bowlly (killed during the London blitz). He collects Bowlly memorabilia, publishes the Bowlly fan-club newsletter, and finds pleasure in lip-synching Bowlly records but his obsession with Bowlly masks certain darker events in his past.
- Jill flees New Smyrna, Florida, and boyfriend Keith, in hopes of a new life as a Miami fashion model in South Beach. With advice and support from drag queens Billee and Mona, she makes it to the top as an international supermodel in only seven weeks. Then, of course, Keith turns up to make trouble.
- Playwright Christopher Hudson finds his medical problem hinders his writing. He employs secretary Sandra George and dictates his new play to her, but tensions soon develop between the two. As Hudson creates, scenes from his play are dramatized and interpolated. The play being created is Dennis Potter's Angels Are So Few, seen with a totally different cast from the 1970 BBC production.
- Facing retirement, elderly journalist Clarence Hubbard reflects on the pointlessness of a life wasted writing banal tabloid human interest, animal, and crime stories. Rather than go quietly to tend roses in a garden, Hubbard begins a series of violent actions not unlike those described in tabloids, and this is heightened by inter cutting tabloid headlines between scenes. Throughout, there are occasional shots of a television critic who watches this very play as it unfolds, and he writes a negative review filled with cleverly phrased but bitter invective.
- Another of Dennis Potter's "visitation dramas": Adultery by John disturbs Janet, so she flirts with the simple, mistreated Billy during the middle of giving him a reading lesson. Unfortunately, it triggers aggressive behavior in Billy which he directs toward John.
- Anthology of unconnected movies of different genres.
- In 1984 Kenith Trodd joined BBC team responding to Channel 4 releases, leading to transition from BBC studio plays to Screen One/Two anthology series. Trodd oversaw first group of titles in these series in 1985.
- During a train ride, an anxiety attack leads middle-aged illustrator John (Sir Alan Bates) into an identity crisis. As his marital problems merge and blur into his fantasy life with prostitutes and call girls, a long-dormant secret friend of his childhood surfaces in his delusions. Writer and Director Dennis Potter viewed John as "a victim of what he himself has created, a sexual fantasy that gets out of control. Fantasy should be one of the registered sexually transmitted diseases, which in John's case, it is."
- A no-nonsense businessman, Mr. Wilkie, is interviewed for a position with a top-of-the-line hotel chain corporation. During the interview, Wilkie attempts to complete a shaggy-dog story. His frustrations lead to a total breakdown. He suddenly snaps and pulls a gun on the interviewers.
- Semi-autobiographical TV play by Dennis Potter, from the BBC's 'Wednesday Play' series. It deals with the experiences of Nigel Barton, a young man from a poor mining community who wins a scholarship to Oxford University. The villagers accuse him of snobbery, while the rich University students treat him like a peasant. Uncertain of which sphere he should be moving in, Nigel tries to reconcile himself with his proud but stubborn father, and also succeed at University, despite its pretentions which apall him.
- Introducing some innovative film techniques, Emshwiller won a Special Award at the Brussels Experimental Film Festival for this expression of internal anguish. He described the film as "The confrontation of a man and his torment. Juxtaposed against his external composure are images of a woman and lights in distortion, with tension heightened by the sounds of power saws and a heartbeat."
- Satirical sketch show. The first such show in the UK. It ran for two seasons before being pulled just before the 1964 general election.
- This was Dennis Potter's first play for independent TV in Great Britain. It aired on ITV's PLAYHOUSE series. Potter contrasted the fading heritage of the British empire with new American values, embodying national traits in his central characters proper British businessman George King, a London suburbanite, who encounters loud and crass sailor Sam Adams, an American who is disrespectful of British culture and traditions.
- Three swindlers advertise a self-assertiveness seminar, lure a dozen victims to a hotel and attempt to persuade them to enroll in their course. However, a man claiming to be the critic-essayist William Hazlitt (1778-1830) attacks the consumerist values outlined by the motivational speaker.
- Tormented and bedridden by a debilitating disease, a mystery writer relives his detective stories through his imagination and hallucinations.
- A secret formula that can cause plants and animals to expand a thousand-fold in size is stolen by a terrorist group. During a wild chase and shoot-out, the formula is lost. It's found by a little girl who accidently gives the formula to her pet snake. After the snake grows to an immense size, it follows and protects her. When the terrorists go after the girl, the snake begins destroying everything in its path.
- A wandering drifter, religious fanatic Gaunt, accidentally sees the rape/murder of a black woman, Marie, by farm boy Ted. The boy's father, Link accuses Gaunt of committing the crime and attempts to get his son to kill both Gaunt and another witness, Marie's mute son. The two victims escape, pursued by father, son and town sheriff Cal into the woods where Gaunt kills Ted and is wounded by Link. With an infected wound, the delirious Gaunt relives his past in flashback, revealing that he was one of the Enola Gay crew members responsible for dropping the atom bomb on Hiroshima.
- Linda is still tormented by giving up a baby for adoption at 15. She wants a baby, but her husband has enough in his model trains, mistress and being a doctor.
- 1964–19701h 20m7.9 (80)TV EpisodeCandidate Nigel Barton goes from idealism to cynicism as he becomes disillusioned and suspicious of hollow campaign promises.
- Dennis Potter, Esther Dyson, William Gibson and other techno-thinkers appeared in this award-winning three-part documentary series which examined social changes brought about by new information technologies, along with other issues and dilemmas facing society in the 21st Century.
- This production for the BBC-2's "Screen Two" series was the last of Dennis Potter's "one-shot, one-slot" plays for television. It had its origins in Potter's 1983 play "Sufficient Carbohydrate," about two middle-aged executives, one English, one American, who both work for the same multinational food company. Together, they vacation with their wives on a Greek island. In the TV adaptation, British businessman Jack becomes bitter as he faces the prospect of seeing his family company taken over by an American corporation. On a holiday at an Italian villa with his new manager, Eddie, he begins to stir up antagonism prompting Eddie's son Clayton to fantasize a murderous outcome.
- "Where Adam Stood" is "based on" the 1907 autobiography, "Father and Son", by Christian fundamentalist and naturalist Edmund Gosse, but Dennis Potter adapted only one section of the book, adding much material of his own invention. The drama was filmed on the Devon coast near Torquay, not far from where Gosse lived. With a literal belief in the Old Testament, Philip Gosse is opposed to the new theories of Charles Darwin, espoused here by biologist Brackley. Assuming "the Lord's will" determines the fate of his ailing son Edmund, Philip Gosse creates a life-threatening situation, even suggesting the illness is God's punishment because of Edmund's desire for a toy ship. While looking at the ship in a shop window, Edmund is approached by the village's mad Mary Teague, and the deranged woman lures the child into the forest for an attempted sexual attack. He resists, throws a stone at her and flees. Later, he also resists and challenges his father's belief system by stating, "The Good Lord says I am to have the ship."
- In 1976, Francis Lee edited footage he shot during the years 1941 to 1945 while an Army combat motion picture cameraman. A pacifist and painter living on New York City's East 10th Street before World War II, Lee initially requested classification as a conscientious objector. Realizing WWII was a war against racism, fascism and totalitarianism, he reconsidered, was classified 1-A and enlisted as an Army cameraman. The film looks back on his growing maturity as he moves closer to combat. Lee calls this a testimonial to "one man's initiation: mine." Scenes of basic training are followed by the 6 June 1944 D-Day landing at Omaha Beach, where his unit suffered a 75% loss, the Liberation of Paris and his visits in Paris with Pablo Picasso. Jonas Mekas commented, "His D-Day footage is so spectacular, so real that I don't think I have ever seen war footage as real, as believable. You know Lee was there and he took it all and you know it was a hell. His Paris liberation footage is about equally spectacular." The film concludes with Lee's return to East 10th Street at the war's end.