Professor discovers unknown Dennis Potter TV script

Professor John Cook
Professor John Cook discovered The Last Television Play amongst Dennis Potter's papers

A Professor from Glasgow Caledonian University has uncovered an unknown TV script by Dennis Potter that casts new light on the creation of The Singing Detective.

The 60-page TV play, handwritten in a private notebook, was penned several years before the celebrated BBC series aired in 1986.

Professor John Cook discovered The Last Television Play amongst papers stored within the late playwright’s archive in the Forest of Dean, Gloucestershire.

The hour-long work, thought to have been written in the early 1980s, features many of the hospital-based scenes familiar to viewers of The Singing Detective.

The lead character Nigel Barton, a writer of television plays, is afflicted by acute psoriatic arthropathy, the same skin condition Potter suffered all his life.

Many memorable sequences featured in The Singing Detective are present in The Last Television Play.

Doctors and nurses lip-synch to the 1947 hit Dry Bones, a South Asian patient dies in the next bed, and the writer character has his skin greased by a nurse in order to ease his pain.

The Singing Detective, starring Michael Gambon as pulp fiction writer Philip Marlow, aired as a six-part series on the BBC in late 1986. It ranks 20th on the British Film Institute’s list of the 100 Greatest British Television Programmes.

Professor Cook, who completed the first British PhD on Potter's work in the early 1990s, said: “It’s extraordinary. It’s the TV equivalent of finding a lost work by Harold Pinter or Samuel Beckett.

“The Last Television Play was intended to be a grotesque sitcom, complete with canned laughter in places. It is prefaced with the ‘death’ of Dennis Potter himself, a comment on how he felt he had ‘sold out’ to America, following the success of Pennies from Heaven.

“In one scene, the main writer protagonist explains he always likes to put jokes in his own work: ‘But people are beginning to see through the jokes. The critics are poking about… in what lies behind them.’”

In a Radio Times interview, publicising The Singing Detective in 1986, Potter appears to confirm the existence of The Last Television Play.

He described how the project had initially begun as a series of scenes set in a hospital ward, which he thought ‘were quite promising’.

Potter said: “I just wanted to make use of some of the comedy that takes place in hospital but the ideas stayed with me and much later they fell into place.”

All of the Potter’s scripts were produced in longhand. They were then handed over to someone else to type up for submission to TV and film production companies.

The Dennis Potter Archive in the Forest of Dean consists of finished typescripts, manuscript copies, and a series of notebooks and papers.

Professor Cook, who has acted as principal academic advisor to the archive, added: “When I interviewed Dennis Potter, I explicitly asked him if he had kept any draft manuscripts of The Singing Detective.

“He replied it was unlikely since he would tend to rip and write over drafts. Therefore, to discover 30 years later his origin manuscript is the extraordinary culmination of a long journey.”

The Last Television Play