Customer Reviews

Dennis Potter - The Last Interview [VHS]

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Melvyn Bragg interviews the dying genius playwright Dennis Potter without maudlin and Potter responds without angst as he races death to finish his last duo of plays: Karioke and Cold Lazarus. Sipping morphine to ease the pain of pancreatic cancer, he talks of the clarity and beauty of life that impending death gives, only afraid that he may be cheated by the grim reaper a few pages too early.

Even if you have never seen a Potter play and so have never had the chance to appreciate how good TV drama can really be, you will find this interview deeply moving and memorable. And afterward, read the reviews of the Singing Detective; if you choose to buy that too, you will almost certainly become one of the many with an insatiable appetite for his work.

Dennis Potter's last interview, given in 1994 when he was dying of pancreatic cancer and living on morpheine, cigarettes, and his work, stands, in my judgment, as one of the most extraordinary documentations of moral courage and intellectual honesty ever committed to videotape.

Why?

First, because Potter is unflinchingly honest in his dicussion of his cancer, his childhood, British politics, his work, his failures, God, and Rupert Murdoch. Watch this interview for Potter on Murdoch if for no other reason.

Second, because Potter faces squarely into the prospect of his life's end. No sentimentality. No pathos. Just honesty and integrity and insight. His comments on the basis for his serenity are deeply moving. To say more would be to trivialize them.

Third, because Potter shows what it's like for a human being to pay close attention to the world and try to express something important about it in art. His words are authentic and from the heart. They're spoken through pain, but they emerge, paradoxically, in joy.

And fourth, because Potter's cultural criticism is scathing and acute, yet never brutal. He's no cynic. Yet he makes himself quite clear that cynicism remains a great danger given the commoditization of everyday life, the trivialization of political discourse, the trend toward entertainment as the main purpose of life, and the centralization of control over publishing and broadcasting.

This interview, the actual videotape of Potter speaking, drinking liquid morpheine, chain smoking, and sipping champagne, is essential if you care one whit about literature, cultural criticism, television, or serious drama. Or if you're simply curious about what a truly honest human being looks and sounds like.

This Channel 4 "Without Walls" special is probably the best television interview I have ever seen. Potter brings the very best out of Melvyn Bragg, one of the UK's most incisive and intelligent interviewers, and gives fully of himself in what he knew would be his last chance to say his piece about media, society and his own life and work. Bragg himself plays his part wonderfully, unobtrusively and sensitively supporting the frail writer throughout this most important of final tasks. As a valedictory postscript to a brilliant career and as an intimate conversation between two engaged thinkers, this programme is not to be missed.

The transcribed interview (also available) cannot, of course, fully capture what the camera has recorded for posterity: Potter's presence, his humour and the exemplary warmth, courtesy and gratitude he showed to Bragg and to the cameramen and engineers. All of this as his life ebbed away.

In my opinion it is this interview, more even than the final screenplays (Karaoke and Cold Lazarus) that he discusses, that puts the shining seal on Potter's cultural legacy.

I watched this when it was first broadcast on British television in 1994. I still think and talk about it. It is awe inspiring.

Absolutely impossible to resist, an amazing interview with Dennis Potter that is completely focused, despite Potter's need for morphine and champagne to mitigate the pain of his illness. Watch this and learn about living.

The previous review says it all: this interview is excellent