Dennis Christopher George Potter (17 May 1935 – 7 June 1994) was an influential English television dramatist, screenwriter and journalist, and the creator of several landmark television dramas which pushed the boundaries of what could be shown on television in Britain. The Moral Guardians of his time weren't fond of his productions, but he mostly took it in his stride – he remarked of Mary Whitehouse that she at least understood the "central moral importance of – to use the grandest word – art" – but when Whitehouse claimed that a pivotal scene in The Singing Detective, in which the protagonist witnesses his mother's adultery, was based on reality, she got sued by Potter's mother and lost, resoundingly.
He frequently threw multiple genres together – The Singing Detective, for example, is part wartime childhood memoir, part detective story, part medical drama, part musical, part commentary on the nature of drama itself – and for a long time, his Signature Style was a scene (or multiple scenes) where a character would "sing" by miming along to a record, often non-diegetic. Another notion he returned to several times was casting full-adult actors to play children (with scaled-up props and sets), as in Stand Up, Nigel Barton and Blue Remembered Hills.
From his late twenties onwards, he suffered from psoriatic arthropathy, a condition that gave him both arthritis in his joints and psoriasis in his skin. He gave the same condition to the central character of The Singing Detective; he stated it was not autobiographical, but simply because he was too lazy to research another medical condition. In late 1993 his wife was diagnosed with breast cancer; a few months later, in 1994, he discovered he had terminal pancreatic cancer that had spread to his liver, probably caused by the medication he took to treat his psoriasis. He continued to care for his wife until her death, and died himself nine days later. His final interview, with Melvyn Bragg, was broadcast very shortly before he passed away; in it, he drank a morphine-champagne cocktail for pain relief, chain-smoked throughout, revealed he had named his cancer "Rupert" after Rupert Murdoch (whom he despised), and talked about his determination to finish writing his final two works – "My only regret is if I die four pages too soon", he confessed. At his suggestion, the two works – Cold Lazarus and Karaoke, linked by a character despite being in wildly different genres – were broadcast, one on The BBC, the other on Channel 4.
