Dennis Potter

Dennis Christopher George Potter was born 17 May 1935 in Berry Hill, a small village in the Forest of Dean, where his grandfather and father were coal miners. Through books, the young Potter found that "words were chariots". He attended school in London and spent two years in the Army. During his three years at Oxford, he wrote The Glittering Coffin (1960), a bitter attack on England. As a BBC trainee, he wrote/hosted Between Two Rivers (1960), a documentary about the Forest of Dean. In 1961 he joined the Daily Herald, where he was TV critic (1962-64). In 1964 he learned he had psoriatic arthropathy, a disease which plagued him for decades, less so after new drugs/treatments turned up. He lost the 1964 election as a Labour candidate, ending his planned political career. That same year, The Wednesday Play (1964) began on the BBC, and he submitted a novel-in-progress, which became his first TV play, The Confidence Course (1965), about motivational seminar swindlers. Over three decades,