Master of vitriol

‘Genuine invective is an almost lost art in our wild satirical age,’ Dennis Potter complained in New Society in 1966. Now, as the British Film Institute celebrates the life and work of ‘the writer who redefined TV drama’, Oberon Books, with perfect timing, offers this collection of Potter’s critical abuse in journalism and interviews at its most constructively eloquent.

The Art of Invective essentially complements Humphrey Carpenter’s magisterial biography and all those DVDs of the plays that can still galvanise what Potter called ‘the palace of varieties in the corner of the room’. He believed that television, with its vast, all-inclusive audience, was a potentially powerful means of promulgating true democracy.

Potter’s stingingly vitriolic invective was motivated mainly by his resentment of puritanical repression, social inequity and the unfairness, as he experienced it, of physical suffering. He was born in 1935 in the Forest of Dean, a rural coal-mining enclave on the western fringe of Gloucestershire. The son of a miner, and the grandson of a miner whose silicosis caused him to spit gobs of phlegm on the family kitchen stove, Dennis was only ten when he first experienced sex at its traumatic unloveliest. During a stay of several months in an overcrowded house in Hammersmith, he was forced to share a bed with a predatory homosexual uncle, who, on returning from the pub, submitted him to fellation.

Dennis was enabled by a high IQ to rise above poverty and the oppressive authority of National Service to gain intellectual achievement as an Oxford undergraduate. While at New College, he edited Isis and Clarion, chaired the university Labour Club, and struggled uncomfortably against the apparently ineradicable class system. He had friends, but antagonistic contemporaries said then and later that he always deliberately contrived controversy for the sake of widespread notoriety.