“Dennis Potter: 3 To Remember” DVD collection

The LA Weekly has a nice write-up about a new DVD collection of prolific writer Dennis Potter TV projects:

At his best, Potter was sublime, but like many prolific geniuses, he could crank out the dross too. I’ve never yet seen a poorly scripted, directed or acted Potter play, but absent the overarching sympathy he felt for his fellow sufferers, he could come off cheap and nasty, and his work deflates like a pricked balloon when he sticks to pure naturalism. The three feature-length television dramas included in the new DVD boxed set “Dennis Potter: 3 to Remember” — the fruit of a brief and troubled 1979 defection to commercial television with his longtime producing partner, Kenith Trodd — are at best uneven, at worst programmatic and unpleasant. Blade on the Feather, starring Donald Pleasance as an elderly writer whose quiet life is horrifically upended by the arrival of an enigmatic stranger (Tom Conti), offers dispiriting evidence of Potter’s habit of falling back on political sloganeering and reflexive hatred of the upper classes. Sexual betrayal, literacy and religion mingle incoherently in Rain on the Roof, with Cheryl Campbell once again doing duty as a spurned wife who doesn’t know her maternal from her carnal as she takes advantage of the mentally handicapped boy she’s teaching to read. It’s no accident that the best of the three, Cream in My Coffee, returns to popular song to dramatize the yearnings in youth and old age of a couple stranded in an unsatisfying marriage.

Potter is likely most well known for “The Singing Detective”, a surreal 6-part TV series. Here’s a taste of it:

Potter, who died of cancer in 1994, has several fansites including here and here. 

Any Dennis Potter fans out there?