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Obituary: Dennis Potter...
...pieces -- and in his stage plays (Sufficient Carbohydrate), screenplays (Track 29) and novels (Ticket to Ride) -- Potter did see things under the aspect of eternity. Novelist Julian Barnes aptly described him as "a Christian socialist with a running edge of apocalyptic disgust." Christian, yes, in residue. Though Potter gave ecclesiastics the willies with his God play (Son of Man) and his Devil play (Brimstone and Treacle), he could still recite, as meaningfully as if it were a pop standard, the words to an old hymn: "Will there be any stars, any stars in my crown?" Socialist, yes, decrying British mercantilism...
...rage against Murdoch was part of a general anger at the present for not living up to the image in the gilded rearview mirror Potter held to his youth. In Blue Remembered Hills he re-created his West Country childhood (but with adult actors as the kids). He larded his breakthrough series, Pennies from Heaven, with sentimental tunes from his '30s infancy. "Childhood," Potter said, "is full to the brim with fear, horror, excitement, joy, boredom, love, anxiety." He was welcome to cherish his youth; he never got to savor...
...should always look back on our own past," he said, "with a sort of tender contempt." The past echoed in Potter's inner ear like an accordion rendition of Peg o' My Heart: trite, tinny, extraordinarily potent. But as his days dwindled, he attended, rapturously, to the present. "I'm almost serene," he said to Bragg. "I can celebrate life. Below my window there's an apple tree in blossom. It's white. And looking at it -- instead of saying, 'Oh, that's a nice blossom' -- now, looking at it through the window, I see the whitest, frothiest, blossomest blossom...
...every life there is so much to celebrate, so much to mourn. In his last days, Dennis Potter did both. Triumphantly, he finished his two plays -- two final blossoms soaked in acid. And he nursed his wife until she died. A week later, disconsolate, Potter followed her, with blood in his eyes and stars in his crown...