I hate the blue remembered hills, I hate the fucking daffodils.

Dennis Potter season on Sky - it should happen!

Blackeyes and Blue Remembered Hills have both been shown recently on UK Drama, but they need to show more.

I wish they would repeat the following:
-Lipstick On Your Collar (a young Ewan McGregor has a bit of a dance)
-Karaoke (under-rated)
-Cold Lazarus (not under-rated as much, but generally interesting)
-Pennies From Heaven (well duh!)
-The Singing Detective (another well duh!)

Bring Potter back to our screens or I'll start lip-synching Steps.

>(shall I paste them in?)

You do, and I'll tell everyone you're gay.

I saw the Patrick Marber-directed play of BRH at the National a few years ago. He did a good job (sorry Stew).

>You do, and I'll tell everyone you're gay.

If I tried to dispell this rumour for you I'd get you into a lot of trouble, wouldn't I?

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

I thought Marber's production totally missed the point, but hey-ho.

I'll paste in what I came here with:

TV100 Part 2, NFT, 08/02/01

I've seen both featured programmes many times before, so I was pretty much just going for the experience of seeing BRH on a decent screen, in a darkened room, and with a hopefully sympathetic audience.

For the purists out there who like to know all of the technical bumph, the original two-reel 16mm print (donated by BBC Archives in 2000, replacing the 1979 copy) was used for the BRH screening, with only a clumsy shift to the second reel spoiling things (the music cut out mid-bar). There is some degradation to the print, notably the brief, nasty picture break up over the cast credits at the end, as well as the inevitable instability at the top of each reel. Going by the C4 screening in 1991, the current D3 master at the BBC archive is an excellent transfer. Even so, the original print looks superb.

'Without Walls', the final interview, emanates from the C4 master, judging by the fade up on the series trailer and the inclusion of the original Melvyn Bragg intro, rather than the alternate version used on subsequent repeats. It also looked like a bog-standard dub, with notably washed out colours.

I left after the Bragg intro anyway. I needed a fag.

Here are the programme notes handed out to the forty or so people in the audience.


BLUE REMEMBERED HILLS

A child is playing in the distance, swooping and buzzing, being an aeroplane. The camera moves in slowly. Suddenly we see that the little boy is a man in child's clothes. All the characters in Dennis Potter's new play 'Blue Remembered Hills' are children played by adults, including such unchildlike actors as Colin Welland, Helen Mirren and John Bird. It's a characteristic Potter shock. As in 'Pennies From Heaven' the actors mimed to '30s songs which commented on the action, here again a bold technical twist jolts the viewer into a different way of seeing.

Dennis Potter says he is reclusive by nature. He is, however a very friendly recluse, who takes great pains to answer questions in detail and with self-searching precision. The play is not, he says firmly, about his own childhood. He just wanted to write about children. 'There were technical reasons why I was interested. Various devices are closed to you � no one can make long speeches explaining what they are at. Rhetoric and allusions are impermissible. I wanted to see whether a story should be told without any of these things.'

These technical considerations were, however, an offshoot of his main preoccupation. 'I don't believe the common adult assumptions about the world of children. I think it is the adult world writ large, not small.' It too is full of jockeying for power and status distinctions, and children relate to each other in a very raw and fundamental way. They say, 'Give me that or I'll thump you'. Potter says, 'It's adult society without all the conventions and the polite forms which overlay it.'

He did not want real children in the play. 'A, nothing is more sickening than child actors and B, it would enable audiences to dismiss them as just children. Using the adult body as a focus is like using a magnifying glass for certain behaviour patterns.' When you dream of your childhood you are an adult in the dream. If children played the parts the effect would be to distance the action. 'I wanted the immediacy and vivacity of a dream, in which you are as you are now.'

The actors had to regress in behaviour to the age of seven or so, which involved a good deal of effort, and building hides on Barnes Common. They fidget and scratch and jump about while others are talking, fight and play cowboys and planes and grownups with total abandon. What people call play, says Potter, is living, trying out roles as adults cannot. 'If you walked into a bank and the bank manager was wearing bovver boots and slogans you'd be worried. He becomes the bank manager and can't play a cowboy or a truck driver. We label each other. Children try out different labels.'

The actors have to behave in a way which could be called overacting if they were playing adults � very interesting that, - Potter remarks � and change moods with a speed and thoroughness � which would earn an adult the label of manic-depressive. Children are intense in happiness as in misery. They live in the moment. That's the art of living which adults have lost. And they become the roles they play. 'We see the world through a haze of habit and convention. Everyone is trying to put a paper bag over children's heads. But it's not on yet.'

Lesley Thornton, 'Radio Times', 27 January 1979

AN INTERVIEW WITH DENNIS POTTER

Dennis Potter was probably the most imaginative and profound television dramatist of our time. In perverse, mordant, sexually graphic masterworks like 'Pennies From Heaven' and 'The Singing Detective' he extended the stylistic and intellectual borders of television drama. In 'Pennies From Heaven' his characters seek to escape their oppressive lives by bursting into song, lip-synching

DENNIS POTTER SEASON
AT THE NFT

Blackeyes uncut (now with plot)
Waving My Weeny At The Forest Of Deany (short)
Light Your Fags With Swan Vestas Or Just Fuck Off (untransmitted ad - '88)
Kellog's Skin Flakes (untransmitted ad - 1974)
All Women Are Rutting Whores (Reith Lecture '72)
'A Cool Guy Like Me' (Steve Martin on Dennis Potter - NBC '78)
Is It Real, Is It Fantasy or Is It Memorex? (ad, '90)
Hill Remembered Blues (American cop show '85)
'It Were Mark Binny, Miss' (a short history of desktop turds)
The Melvyn Bragg Interview (out-takes - inc the bit where Potter offers Bragg
some morphine and says 'Go on, Mel, have a drop - you're my best pal�' and a
photo-montage of the pair hitting Stringfellows after the session.)

I thought some of them were worth having an audience, Joe. Now where did you put that KY?

You're a big gay poof and you sleep with men.

Let that be an end to the matter.