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PAINTING THE CLOUDS: A PORTRAIT OF DENNIS POTTER
BBC Two: Saturday 25 December 2004 9.40pm-11.10pm
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Dennis Potter was the best loved, best hated, most talked about, most prolific and arguably the best television playwright of his day. The seriousness with which he approached his craft and his refusal to accept the naturalistic conventions of the medium changed the face of television drama for ever. His classic series Pennies From Heaven and The Singing Detective were the high points in an age when serious television drama was watched by millions - a collective experience for the nation.
Here, his children - Sarah and Jane - talk for the first time on television about their father and life with him at home. And the mining community to which Potter's father belonged, and in which he spent most of his own life, has given Arena unprecedented access; particularly to the one remaining working pit in the Forest of Dean and the Salem Chapel. The chapel is a place of worship built by the hands of 10 local families, whose descendants - including Potter's sister, June - still use it to celebrate their own individual version of Nonconformist religion.
 Audio Interviews: Hear Potter in conversation
The strongest presence in the film is Potter himself. A superb journalist and polemicist, he left two extraordinary confessional pieces - an address to the Edinburgh Television Festival and a final interview with novelist and broadcaster Melvyn Bragg, given when he knew he had only months to live. They are among the most powerful and frank pieces of self-expression that have graced the medium this extraordinary writer made so uniquely his own.
Timeline: Follow Dennis Potter's life and career
Potter was a controversial national figure. One of his finest plays - Brimstone and Treacle about a disabled girl who is raped by the Devil - was banned by Alasdair Milne, Director General of the BBC at that time, and was only finally transmitted a decade after it had been written and filmed.
The public perception of Dennis Potter, fuelled by tabloid headlines and agitation from Mary Whitehouse and the moral majority, clouded reception of much of his work. He was seen as Dirty Den, a sex-obsessed Mr Filth of television - and this image has pursued him long after his death. Painting the Clouds, an Arena portrait of Dennis Potter, looks at the whole man and finds a very different character indeed from the one so often portrayed by journalists, documentary makers and biographers.
Potter at the BBC homepage
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