Letters to the Editor - May 2015

DENNIS POTTER – THE REAL AUTEUR Dear Editor, While history and memory and the memory of history all seem to get shorter and shorter every decade, it’s a little surprising that neither James McNamara’s informative essay (ABR, April 2014), nor one of your commentators, could have found space for even a brief mention of the one writer for television who really does deserve the term auteur – Dennis Potter. For all the merits of I, Claudius or Brideshead Revisited, they could hardly be said to have stretched the boundaries of the form, or set about re-imagining its aesthetics. But starting with the Bill Brand series from 1965 (which featured address to camera and breaking the frame way before the British or American House of Cards), Dennis Potter, in series such as Pennies from Heaven (1978) and The Singing Detective (1986), and in one-off dramas such as Blue Remembered Hills (1979) and Blade on the Feather (1980), revolutionised the medium and its relation to the audience. To introduce last year’s London BFI season of Potter’s work, Michael Newton in the Guardian (31 May 2014) provided as concise and instructive (as well as critical) a survey of Potter’s achievement as one might wish. He calls him ‘one of the great geniuses of TV’, but even more to the point is his apt encapsulation of what distinguishes his best work: ‘he makes you laugh, he makes you remember, he breaks your heart.’ Michael Morley, Fullarton, SA JAMES MCNAMARA REPLIES: I am grateful to Michael Morley for raising the work of Dennis Potter. Because of the breadth of television as a topic, it was necessary for me to select a focus for my argument. As I note in my piece, I chose to examine the past fifteen years of US television because the developments in the medium during that period have led to it being described as ‘revolutionary’, or a ‘golden age’. I sought to interrogate that claim. As a result of this temporal focus, there were a number of wonderful creatives and shows that I was unable to consider. But Professor Morley’s letter is a welcome contribution: ultimately, the more discussion we have about excellent television in senior literary journals, the better.

From the New Issue

Always Will Be by Mykaela Saunders

‘When we talk about the Middle Ages: Revisiting the power of periodisation’ by G. Geltner

The New World Disorder: How the West is destroying itself by Peter R. Neumann, translated by David Shaw

‘“Thin labourism”: How is the Albanese government travelling?’ by Frank Bongiorno