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1-9 of 9
- After a brief tutelage with innovative BBC documentary producer Denis Mitchell, Dennis Potter teamed with producer Anthony de Lotbiniere to film a documentary (later described by David Niven as "absolutely wonderful"). Returning to the Berry Hill roots of his childhood, Potter used interviews with locals (including his parents) to show changes in the working-class traditions of the Forest of Dean, where "the green forest has a deep black heart beneath its sudden hills, pushing up slag heaps and gray little villages clustering around the coal."
- "When we dream of childhood," said Dennis Potter, "we take our present selves with us. It is not the adult world writ small; childhood is the adult world writ large." Since Potter viewed childhood as "adult society without all the conventions and the polite forms which overlay it," he repeated the device he had introduced 14 years earlier (in "Stand Up, Nigel Barton"); children's roles were cast with adult actors in this naturalistic memory drama of a "golden day" that turns to tragedy. On a sunny, summer afternoon in bucolic England of 1943, seven West Country children (two girls, five boys) play in the Forest of Dean. Their games and spontaneous actions (continuous and in real time) reflect their awareness of WWII, but no adults are present to intrude. As the group moves through the woods and back to the grassy hills, their words and actions illustrate how "childhood is not transparent with innocence." When the two girls push a pram into a barn to play house, the casting concept is heightened, doubling back on itself in a remarkable moment: adults are suddenly seen to be acting as children who are pretending to be adults, and lines from Housman echo across the years: "That is the land of lost content/I see it shining plain/The happy highways where I went/And cannot come again."
- An English girl marries a German lawyer in the 1930s and they try to live as normal a life as they can in Hitler's Germany. When Allied bombs start falling on German cities, Christabel takes her two young sons to a village in the mountains. Then she learns that her husband and some of his friends have been arrested for plotting to assassinate Hitler. She travels to the prison where he is held, wondering if telling the commandant that she knows Winston Churchill will help her husband or seal his fate. This is said to be based on a true story.
- During a train ride, an anxiety attack leads middle-aged illustrator John (Sir Alan Bates) into an identity crisis. As his marital problems merge and blur into his fantasy life with prostitutes and call girls, a long-dormant secret friend of his childhood surfaces in his delusions. Writer and Director Dennis Potter viewed John as "a victim of what he himself has created, a sexual fantasy that gets out of control. Fantasy should be one of the registered sexually transmitted diseases, which in John's case, it is."
- Semi-autobiographical TV play by Dennis Potter, from the BBC's 'Wednesday Play' series. It deals with the experiences of Nigel Barton, a young man from a poor mining community who wins a scholarship to Oxford University. The villagers accuse him of snobbery, while the rich University students treat him like a peasant. Uncertain of which sphere he should be moving in, Nigel tries to reconcile himself with his proud but stubborn father, and also succeed at University, despite its pretentions which apall him.
- Satirical sketch show. The first such show in the UK. It ran for two seasons before being pulled just before the 1964 general election.
- Three swindlers advertise a self-assertiveness seminar, lure a dozen victims to a hotel and attempt to persuade them to enroll in their course. However, a man claiming to be the critic-essayist William Hazlitt (1778-1830) attacks the consumerist values outlined by the motivational speaker.
- Tormented and bedridden by a debilitating disease, a mystery writer relives his detective stories through his imagination and hallucinations.
- 1964–19701h 20m7.9 (80)TV EpisodeCandidate Nigel Barton goes from idealism to cynicism as he becomes disillusioned and suspicious of hollow campaign promises.