I am not a fan of Dennis Potter, although I believe that he could have produced good work if the producers of his TV series had been less indulgent, and had forced him to cut his scripts in the interest of wit, point, and (above all) brevity.
I once sat through "The Singing Detective", which was not bad apart from the umpteen pieces of repeat footage. I even endured the Bob Hoskins version of "Pennies From Heaven", which I thought would never end, and which was padded out with surely every third-rate song from the 1920's. At least half of it should have been left on the cutting-room floor. The shortened film version starring Steve Martin and Bernadette Peters was a perfect validation of the adage "Less is more".
In another piece Potter used grownups in the roles of children. This was a good basic idea, but he did nothing inventive with it. I found it as watchable as a one-joke comedy.
Some of Dennis Potter's other pieces were so dull and slow-moving that I gave up after ten minutes. But none was a feeble as "Cold Lazarus", in which it was proposed that all records of past history had been inexplicably lost (HOW?), and in which one character came up with a BRILLIANT (?) idea for a new TV series, which clearly was nothing more than a rehash of those old mystery/horror TV series produced by Rod Serling and others.
Maybe Dennis Potter had never watched TV back in those days. A pity, because he could have learned a lot.
I once sat through "The Singing Detective", which was not bad apart from the umpteen pieces of repeat footage. I even endured the Bob Hoskins version of "Pennies From Heaven", which I thought would never end, and which was padded out with surely every third-rate song from the 1920's. At least half of it should have been left on the cutting-room floor. The shortened film version starring Steve Martin and Bernadette Peters was a perfect validation of the adage "Less is more".
In another piece Potter used grownups in the roles of children. This was a good basic idea, but he did nothing inventive with it. I found it as watchable as a one-joke comedy.
Some of Dennis Potter's other pieces were so dull and slow-moving that I gave up after ten minutes. But none was a feeble as "Cold Lazarus", in which it was proposed that all records of past history had been inexplicably lost (HOW?), and in which one character came up with a BRILLIANT (?) idea for a new TV series, which clearly was nothing more than a rehash of those old mystery/horror TV series produced by Rod Serling and others.
Maybe Dennis Potter had never watched TV back in those days. A pity, because he could have learned a lot.