Born in a poor, mining community in Berry Hill, Forest of Dean, Potter graduated from Oxford University in 1959 and joined the BBC's documentaries department. He became a television critic and dramatist after he developed psoriatic arthropathy, the debilitating hereditary disease he endured for the rest of his life.Potter gained notoriety through The Wednesday Play series, invented in 1964 to revitalise the television play and create a home for contemporary writing. In the autobiographical Stand Up Nigel Barton and Vote, Vote, Vote for Nigel Barton his depiction of a manipulative party agent led to a controversial rewrite by BBC executives.
Potter's work was often fiercely controversial. Double Dare, a murky and upsetting tale of artistic and sexual prostitution, provoked a minor uproar, and Brimstone and Treacle, a black comedy, was banned in 1976. However, in 1978 Potter's reputation for quality and controversy was established with the production of Pennies from Heaven, starring Bob Hoskins as a depression-era sheet-music salesman having a doomed adulterous affair.
He dramatised the horrors of his psoriatic arthropathy in The Singing Detective, probably his best-known drama about a writer confined to a hospital bed dreaming of his childhood, mentally rewriting a detective novel, and hallucinating fantastic songs.
Potter's final years saw him become overindulged by the television industry. However, his last interview in 1994, when he announced he was dying of pancreatic and liver cancer, was one of the great television events of our time reminding us of what an exciting and considerable man he was.
