One of the leading English playwrights of the latter half of the 20th Century, as well as an intelligent, vigorous and important writer working in TV from the late 1960s until his death, Dennis Potter adapted several of his works for film as well, contributing original screenplays for "Gorky Park" (1983), "Dreamchild" (1985) and "Track 29" (1987). Beginning as a newspaper journalist and TV critic, he wrote and produced documentaries for the BBC in the early 1960s. He showed an early interest in politics with his two "Nigel Barton" plays as well as his unsuccessful attempt to run for political office as a Labour Party candidate. It was also around this time that the handicap which would plague Potter from then on first appeared: psoriatic arthropathy, a skin disorder which caused frequent blistering, burning sensations, swelling of the joints, a permanent clenching of the fists and even bouts of delirium.
A vivid writer unafraid to make overt political points in his TV writing, Potter also possessed a keen imagination and a delicious if sometimes controversial flair for the perverse. The BBC, for instance, insisted that he rewrite a teleplay, "Almost Cinderella" (1966), which had Prince Charming strangling Cinderella at the stroke of midnight. Perhaps his most controversial work, though, was "Brimstone and Treacle" (1976), a story of a comatose young woman who revives after being raped by the Devil, which the BBC sat on for 11 years before airing it.
Potter's work, did not, however, achieve its widest attention or acclaim at home (or even recognition in the US) until the appearance of his six-part musical TV drama, "Pennies from Heaven" (1976), in which recordings of popular songs from the 1940s were used as an inventive and ironic means of commenting on the narrative. The English version, which starred Bob Hoskins, was semi-effectively transferred to the American screen by Herbert Ross in 1981 with Steve Martin in the leading role of a sheet music traveling salesman.
Potter was similarly acclaimed for "The Singing Detective", a multi-layered, semi-autobiographical drama in which the hallucinatory hospital experiences of an ailing author (like Potter suffering from a chronic, debilitating skin disease) mirror the adventures of one of his fictional protagonists. The success of the miniseries led to its release in theatrical form in the US in 1989.
Potter made his theatrical directorial debut with the convoluted, cerebral "Secret Friends" (1992), based on his novel "Ticket to Ride", about an illustrator who experiences a mental breakdown while commuting on a train to London. Shortly before his death from cancer at age 59, Potter completed two more TV works, the miniseries "Karaoke" and the TV-movie, "Cold Lazarus", in which he again explores, via vivid metaphors and a sure feel for intelligent, innovative entertainment, the pains, constraints and hypocrisies of society and the roles it requires people to play.