Dennis Potter’s last interview, Part 7

Each day this week, we have been featuring a segment from the last interview given by the late great writer Dennis Potter. His TV credits are remarkable including one of the greatest limited run series of all time “The Singing Detective”. Other credits include numerous televised plays such as Stand Up, Nigel Barton! and Son of Man, television serials such as “Casanova” and “Pennies from Heaven”, and movies like Gorky Park and Dreamchild.

On February 14, 1994, Potter learned he had terminal cancer. This interview was conducted on March 15 of that year. It aired on Channel 4 in the U.K. on April 5, 1994. Potter died a few months later on June 4.

Here is Part 7 of the interview:

A remarkable interview with a remarkable writer. Here is just a small part of what Potter says in his final public sit-down:

We all, we’re the one animal that knows that we’re going to die, and yet we carry on paying our mortgages, doing our jobs, moving about, behaving as though there’s eternity in a sense. And we forget or tend to forget that life can only be defined in the present tense; it is is, and it is now only. I mean, as much as we would like to call back yesterday and indeed yearn to, and ache to sometimes, we can’t. It’s in us, but we can’t actually; it’s not there in front of us. However predictable tomorrow is, and unfortunately for most people, most of the time, it’s too predictable, they’re locked into whatever situation they’re locked into … Even so, no matter how predictable it is, there’s the element of the unpredictable, of the you don’t know. The only thing you know for sure is the present tense, and that nowness becomes so vivid that, almost in a perverse sort of way, I’m almost serene. You know, I can celebrate life.

Below my window in Ross, when I’m working in Ross, for example, there at this season, the blossom is out in full now, there in the west early. It’s a plum tree, it looks like apple blossom but it’s white, and looking at it, instead of saying “Oh that’s nice blossom” … last week looking at it through the window when I’m writing, I see it is the whitest, frothiest, blossomest blossom that there ever could be, and I can see it. Things are both more trivial than they ever were, and more important than they ever were, and the difference between the trivial and the important doesn’t seem to matter. But the nowness of everything is absolutely wondrous, and if people could see that, you know. There’s no way of telling you; you have to experience it, but the glory of it, if you like, the comfort of it, the reassurance … not that I’m interested in reassuring people — bugger that. The fact is, if you see the present tense, boy do you see it! And boy can you celebrate it.

The only thing you know for sure is the present tense.

I wonder if writers can know this perhaps more deeply than others. Movies and television are written in the present tense. As we write, we sit with our characters attempting to live in the moment with them, experience how a scene unfolds, what happens with them in the ‘now.’ I suppose that is the purest of the writing process, being immersed into that state of “nowness.” And then when we return to this world, it’s back to the mortgages, bills, schedules… and that sense of the present tense so easily gets lost.

Maybe it’s just a fact of life… that we never really appreciate existence, not in the fullest way possible until we know we are dying. I say that with no judgment or attempt to guilt you or I to live a more purposeful and aware life, although that would be nice. Rather my point is that as writers, each day we sit with our story, we are given a great gift — the opportunity to live in the present tense. Yes, perhaps only a shadow of the experience we may have later on as we approach our own terminus. But an experience of the present nonetheless, a taste of what it means to be immersed completely into our existence, even as we accomplish that by entering into the existence of those characters we create.

Something to ponder the next time you sit down to write… and live for those few hours in the present tense.

Thank you, Dennis Potter, for reminding us of that. And for all your stories.