Hero Corner No.3: Dennis Potter

In honour of Cathode Ray Tube's splendid article on The Singing Detective here's my all-time favourite TV moment...



My mum was obsessed with Dennis Potter, and I think she saw a lot of herself in Marlowe's isolation, aloofness and frustration (as, increasingly, do I). There were uncanny echoes of the long spells she'd spent in hospital over the years and her escape into a fantasy dreamworld of old pop songs. For me, the brilliance of Potter's talent was being able to capture the bewildering complexity of real people in his work. His writing holds more profound truths than the kitchen sink naturalists he'd graduated alongside simply because he approached the way he communicated so differently. He used every facet of the medium to take those characters to their most wonderful or terrifying extremes. It might be a horribly ironic song and dance routine haunting the protagonist, adults playing children at their cruelest or an inversion of conventional morality, such as the devil raping a disabled girl back to health. There's echoes of that daring melding of character and style in Kaufman and Almodóvar films, but I can't think of another writer who managed that so successfully on TV.