Dennis Potter - Early Career

Early Career

After Oxford, Potter joined the BBC, initially as a trainee in radio and then television journalism, during which time he worked on Panorama including front of camera work on his personal film "Between Two Rivers" (1960) which is about the closure of coalpits in the Forest of Dean. But he did not take to television journalism, and joined the Daily Herald newspaper. From August 1961 he became a television critic for the Herald and its successor, The Sun in its pre-Murdoch incarnation, published by the International Press Corporation.

Potter's first non-fiction work, The Glittering Coffin, was published by the Gollancz Press in 1960. The book was a rumination on the changing face of England in the prosperity following the end of the war years. It was followed by The Changing Forest: Life in the Forest of Dean Today (1962), which was based on the "Between Two Rivers" documentary. This book is a study of class and social mobility that demonstrates an early fascination with the effects of the mass media on British cultural life.

He soon returned to television. Herald journalist David Nathan persuaded Potter to collaborate with him on sketches for That Was The Week That Was. Their first piece was used in the edition of 5 January 1963.

Potter stood as the Labour Party candidate for Hertfordshire East, a safe Conservative Party seat, in the 1964 general election against the incumbent Derek Walker-Smith. By the end of the campaign, he claimed that he was so disillusioned with party politics he did not even vote for himself. His candidacy was unsuccessful.

In 1962 Potter had begun to suffer from an acute form of psoriasis known as psoriatic arthropathy that affected his skin and caused arthritis in his joints. It also made a conventional career path impossible. Potter embarked on a career as a television playwright, largely after being inspired by the Granada version of Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace (1963), based on Erwin Piscator's stage production. He wrote in the Daily Herald that it was "surely the most exciting evening that TV has ever given us",