Potrzebie
Saturday, June 02, 2012
Double Dare (1976) and Blue Remembered Hills (1979)
.
Dennis Potter's astonishing, multi-layered Double Dare was telecast by the BBC in 1976. For the BBC's Play for Today series, Potter wrote Double Dare as a reflexive commentary on writers and actresses. It was the first Potter production to be done entirely on film.
Playwright Martin Ellis intends to write a play about a prostitute and her client at a hotel. So he invites the actress he plans for the part to join him for a drink at a hotel, hoping this will give him some material to work with. As they talk in the hotel lobby, the boundaries between fantasy and reality begin to blur and overlap.
Scenes included in this clip from BBC Close Up show the play's innovative experiment of double dramas interweaving. Actress Kika Markham's memories of Potter and the production reveal yet another psychological level, as she explains how Potter invited her to meet him at a hotel before he wrote the play. Embedding has been disabled, so to see it, go here. For another Double Dare scene, go here and move to the three-minute mark. Blue Remembered Hills was also written for Play for Today.
Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?
That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.
--A.E. Housman (1896)
"When we dream of childhood," said Dennis Potter, "we take our present selves with us. It is not the adult world writ small; childhood is the adult world writ large." Potter viewed childhood as "adult society without all the conventions and the polite forms which overlay it," so the cruelty of children emerges in Potter's Blue Remembered Hills (1979), a theme also explored by Ray Bradbury ("The Playground") and Margaret Atwood (Cat's Eye). For Blue Remembered Hills, Potter employed the device he had introduced 14 years earlier (in Stand Up, Nigel Barton): children's roles were cast with adult actors, providing "a magnifying glass to show what it's like to be a child" in this naturalistic memory drama of a "golden day" that turns to tragedy.
On a sunny, summer afternoon in bucolic England of 1943, seven West Country children (two girls, five boys) play in the Forest of Dean. Their games and spontaneous actions (continuous and in real time) reflect their awareness of WWII, but no adults are present to intrude. As the group moves through the woods and back to the grassy hills, their words and actions illustrate how "childhood is not transparent with innocence." When the two girls (Helen Mirren, Janine Duvitski) push a pram into a barn to play house, the casting concept is heightened, doubling back on itself in a remarkable moment: adults are suddenly seen to be acting as children who are pretending to be adults, and lines from Housman echo across the years.
Cast: Colin Welland (Willie), Michael Elphick (Peter), Robin Ellis (John), John Bird (Raymond), Helen Mirren (Angela), Janine Duvitski (Audrey), Colin Jeavons (Donald), Dennis Potter (Narrator). Potter reads the Housman poem at the conclusion.
Dennis Potter's astonishing, multi-layered Double Dare was telecast by the BBC in 1976. For the BBC's Play for Today series, Potter wrote Double Dare as a reflexive commentary on writers and actresses. It was the first Potter production to be done entirely on film.
Playwright Martin Ellis intends to write a play about a prostitute and her client at a hotel. So he invites the actress he plans for the part to join him for a drink at a hotel, hoping this will give him some material to work with. As they talk in the hotel lobby, the boundaries between fantasy and reality begin to blur and overlap.
Scenes included in this clip from BBC Close Up show the play's innovative experiment of double dramas interweaving. Actress Kika Markham's memories of Potter and the production reveal yet another psychological level, as she explains how Potter invited her to meet him at a hotel before he wrote the play. Embedding has been disabled, so to see it, go here. For another Double Dare scene, go here and move to the three-minute mark. Blue Remembered Hills was also written for Play for Today.
Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?
That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.
--A.E. Housman (1896)
"When we dream of childhood," said Dennis Potter, "we take our present selves with us. It is not the adult world writ small; childhood is the adult world writ large." Potter viewed childhood as "adult society without all the conventions and the polite forms which overlay it," so the cruelty of children emerges in Potter's Blue Remembered Hills (1979), a theme also explored by Ray Bradbury ("The Playground") and Margaret Atwood (Cat's Eye). For Blue Remembered Hills, Potter employed the device he had introduced 14 years earlier (in Stand Up, Nigel Barton): children's roles were cast with adult actors, providing "a magnifying glass to show what it's like to be a child" in this naturalistic memory drama of a "golden day" that turns to tragedy.
On a sunny, summer afternoon in bucolic England of 1943, seven West Country children (two girls, five boys) play in the Forest of Dean. Their games and spontaneous actions (continuous and in real time) reflect their awareness of WWII, but no adults are present to intrude. As the group moves through the woods and back to the grassy hills, their words and actions illustrate how "childhood is not transparent with innocence." When the two girls (Helen Mirren, Janine Duvitski) push a pram into a barn to play house, the casting concept is heightened, doubling back on itself in a remarkable moment: adults are suddenly seen to be acting as children who are pretending to be adults, and lines from Housman echo across the years.
Cast: Colin Welland (Willie), Michael Elphick (Peter), Robin Ellis (John), John Bird (Raymond), Helen Mirren (Angela), Janine Duvitski (Audrey), Colin Jeavons (Donald), Dennis Potter (Narrator). Potter reads the Housman poem at the conclusion.
Labels: blue remembered hills, dennis potter, helen mirren, ray bradbury
¶ 4:38 PM 0 comments
Sunday, November 13, 2011
Set in 1956, Dennis Potter's Lipstick on Your Collar (1993) features Ewan McGregor (his first major role) and Louise Germaine lip-synching Mickey and Sylvia's "Love Is Strange".
Labels: dennis potter, ewan mcgregor, louise germaine
¶ 6:08 PM 0 comments
Monday, February 04, 2008
Synco-Sympho
Click header above for Irving Berlin's "Let's Have Another Cup of Coffee" (1932) with Fred Waring's Pennsylvanians (vocal by Chuck Bullock and the Three Waring Girls) from WFMU's Charlie.
Just around the corner,
There's a rainbow in the sky,
So let's have another cup of coffee
And let's have another piece of pie.
Here's a stunning 1932 photo of New York's Roxy Theater from the Fred Waring Collection at Penn State in State College, Pennsylvania (where Waring died in 1984). He studied architecture there until 1922 when his music caught on, followed by the hits "Sleep" (1923) and "Collegiate" (1925), the sound film Syncopation (1929) and his initial success on radio in 1933 on The Old Gold Hour (CBS). Dennis Potter incorporated Waring into the soundtrack of The Singing Detective (1986) with the unforgettable "Dry Bones" (1947) production number.
Fascinated with gadgets, "The Man Who Taught America How to Sing" also made kitchens whir when he successfully marketed his Waring Blender during the 1930s. However, the term "Synco-Sympho" faded into such obscurity that Google produces not a single result.
Waring was also a major collector of cartoons and comic strips, and these are part of Penn State's Fred Waring Collection. Click here for the story behind Waring's collection and his association with the National Cartoonists Society and also this Mike Lynch post.
Just around the corner,
There's a rainbow in the sky,
So let's have another cup of coffee
And let's have another piece of pie.
Here's a stunning 1932 photo of New York's Roxy Theater from the Fred Waring Collection at Penn State in State College, Pennsylvania (where Waring died in 1984). He studied architecture there until 1922 when his music caught on, followed by the hits "Sleep" (1923) and "Collegiate" (1925), the sound film Syncopation (1929) and his initial success on radio in 1933 on The Old Gold Hour (CBS). Dennis Potter incorporated Waring into the soundtrack of The Singing Detective (1986) with the unforgettable "Dry Bones" (1947) production number.
Fascinated with gadgets, "The Man Who Taught America How to Sing" also made kitchens whir when he successfully marketed his Waring Blender during the 1930s. However, the term "Synco-Sympho" faded into such obscurity that Google produces not a single result.
Waring was also a major collector of cartoons and comic strips, and these are part of Penn State's Fred Waring Collection. Click here for the story behind Waring's collection and his association with the National Cartoonists Society and also this Mike Lynch post.
Michael Gambon and Joanne Whalley in the magnificent
"Dry Bones" production number from The Singing Detective
(1986), performed to Fred Waring's recording.
Labels: dennis potter, fred waring, gambon
¶ 5:49 AM 2 comments
Friday, December 21, 2007
Blue Remembered Hills
Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?
That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.
--A.E. Housman (1896)
"When we dream of childhood," said Dennis Potter, "we take our present selves with us. It is not the adult world writ small; childhood is the adult world writ large." Potter viewed childhood as "adult society without all the conventions and the polite forms which overlay it," so the cruelty of children emerges in Potter's Blue Remembered Hills (1979), a theme also explored by Ray Bradbury ("The Playground") and Margaret Atwood (Cat's Eye). For Blue Remembered Hills, Potter employed the device he had introduced 14 years earlier (in Stand Up, Nigel Barton): children's roles were cast with adult actors, providing "a magnifying glass to show what it's like to be a child" in this naturalistic memory drama of a "golden day" that turns to tragedy.
Cast: Colin Welland (Willie), Michael Elphick (Peter), Robin Ellis (John), John Bird (Raymond), Helen Mirren (Angela), Janine Duvitski (Audrey), Colin Jeavons (Donald), Dennis Potter (Narrator). Potter reads the Housman poem at the conclusion.
Oddly reminiscent of Potter and Housman is this video of Glósóli by Sigur Rós, filmed in Iceland in August 2005 by directors Stefan Arni and Siggi Kinski with Swedish director Ted Karlsson.
For commercials and more music videos by Arni and Kinski, go here.
The same year that Housman wrote his poem, Ernest Dowson (1867-1900) wrote the poem that gave JP Miller the title for his Days of Wine and Roses teleplay (originally on Playhouse 90 in 1958). The poem's title is from Horace's Ode I and translates as: "The shortness of life prevents us from entertaining far-off hopes."
Vitae Summa Brevis Spem Nos Vetet Incohare Longam
They are not long, the weeping and the laughter,
Love and desire and hate;
I think they have no portion in us after
We pass the gate.
They are not long, the days of wine and roses:
Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes
Within a dream.
-- Ernest Dowson (1896)
Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?
That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.
--A.E. Housman (1896)
"When we dream of childhood," said Dennis Potter, "we take our present selves with us. It is not the adult world writ small; childhood is the adult world writ large." Potter viewed childhood as "adult society without all the conventions and the polite forms which overlay it," so the cruelty of children emerges in Potter's Blue Remembered Hills (1979), a theme also explored by Ray Bradbury ("The Playground") and Margaret Atwood (Cat's Eye). For Blue Remembered Hills, Potter employed the device he had introduced 14 years earlier (in Stand Up, Nigel Barton): children's roles were cast with adult actors, providing "a magnifying glass to show what it's like to be a child" in this naturalistic memory drama of a "golden day" that turns to tragedy.
On a sunny, summer afternoon in bucolic England of 1943, seven West Country children (two girls, five boys) play in the Forest of Dean. Their games and spontaneous actions (continuous and in real time) reflect their awareness of WWII, but no adults are present to intrude. As the group moves through the woods and back to the grassy hills, their words and actions illustrate how "childhood is not transparent with innocence." When the two girls (Helen Mirren, Janine Duvitski) push a pram into a barn to play house, the casting concept is heightened, doubling back on itself in a remarkable moment: adults are suddenly seen to be acting as children who are pretending to be adults, and lines from Housman echo across the years.
Cast: Colin Welland (Willie), Michael Elphick (Peter), Robin Ellis (John), John Bird (Raymond), Helen Mirren (Angela), Janine Duvitski (Audrey), Colin Jeavons (Donald), Dennis Potter (Narrator). Potter reads the Housman poem at the conclusion.
Oddly reminiscent of Potter and Housman is this video of Glósóli by Sigur Rós, filmed in Iceland in August 2005 by directors Stefan Arni and Siggi Kinski with Swedish director Ted Karlsson.
For commercials and more music videos by Arni and Kinski, go here.
The same year that Housman wrote his poem, Ernest Dowson (1867-1900) wrote the poem that gave JP Miller the title for his Days of Wine and Roses teleplay (originally on Playhouse 90 in 1958). The poem's title is from Horace's Ode I and translates as: "The shortness of life prevents us from entertaining far-off hopes."
Vitae Summa Brevis Spem Nos Vetet Incohare Longam
They are not long, the weeping and the laughter,
Love and desire and hate;
I think they have no portion in us after
We pass the gate.
They are not long, the days of wine and roses:
Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes
Within a dream.
-- Ernest Dowson (1896)
Labels: dennis potter, helen mirren, jp miller, ray bradbury
¶ 5:08 AM 0 comments
Saturday, November 03, 2007
The Blossomest Blossom
.
Dennis Potter disliked Rupert Murdoch so much that he gave the name "Rupert" to his cancer. In the weeks before his death (June 7, 1994), Potter was writing ten pages a day in a desperate attempt to complete his last two teleplays, the interlinked Karaoke and Cold Lazarus, before he died. On Without Walls (April 5, 1994) Potter took swigs from a flask of liquid morphine while he was interviewed by Melvyn Bragg, possibly the most unforgettable interview ever done for television. Potter talked with Bragg about his impending demise in a casual, celebratory fashion, seeing the world in a different way and marveling at the "nowness" of it all:
The interview was the polar opposite of the last interview with dying, crying Peanuts cartoonist Charles Schulz shown near the end of last week's American Masters profile of Schulz on PBS. The documentary revealed how Schulz incorporated his own past into his comic strip, just as Potter reworked his life into The Singing Detective and other teleplays. Possibly Schulz was crying after a lifetime of seeing writers misspell his name as "Schultz." Even PBS couldn't get it right. (It's sort of like the mistake of adding a dot to "Dr Pepper".)
In this clip Potter tells Bragg about virtual reality and the other concepts that prompted the futuristic science fiction drama, Cold Lazarus (1996), his final work for television.
In Potter's Karaoke (1996), obsessive, self-destructive London television scriptwriter Daniel Feeld (Albert Finney) finds his health failing while involved with the post-production on his new TV drama, Karaoke. Potter was dying, and so is Feeld. The name is an obvious pun on "Potter's Field," yet as Richard Corliss has noted, it is the landscape of Potter's entire life. A hard-drinking heavy smoker, Feeld is in much physical pain as he struggles with pancreatic cancer. Going about his daily routines, he has some odd experiences leading him to conclude that his fictional creations are erupting into real life.
He overhears people speaking scraps of his own dialogue, including young Sandra Sollars (Saffron Burrows), hostess at a karaoke club run by petty thug Arthur "Pig" Maillion (Hywel Bennett). Feeld fears Sandra could be threatened by "Pig" Maillion in a manner similar to scenes he wrote for Karaoke, as his memory, fantasy and reality overlap and interweave into a complex mental tapestry that takes the viewer back to Potter's earlier works, Pennies from Heaven (1981) and The Singing Detective (1986). At the karaoke club, Feeld sings "Pennies from Heaven." "Stars in My Crown," the hymn Potter recalled from his childhood and featured prominently in The Singing Detective, is referenced in Karaoke, in Cold Lazarus and also in John Turturro's Potter-influenced Romance and Cigarettes (2005). It seems likely that, in his teens, Potter saw the movie Stars in My Crown (1950), starring Joel McCrea as the minister in a small frontier community after the Civil War.
Feeld returns three centuries later as a disembodied head in Cold Lazarus. While technology has advanced in the 24th Century, global corporate control has brought about an austere, antiseptic way of life. In the year 2368, the Luddites of the terrorist organization RON (Reality or Nothing) seek a return to the tranquility of earlier times.
At the Masdon Science Center, a team of scientists led by Emma Porlock (Frances De La Tour) work to extract memories from Feeld's cryogenically preserved head. The scientists glide about their lab in chairs which respond to their thoughts of movement and direction. Porlock says, "We can break into this man’s synapses. Imagine the wonder of it all. And if we wear our VR helmets we will live for hours at a time in the real past, the authentic past – and perhaps escape."
When they finally succeed, they watch in awe as Feeld's memories are displayed on the large "memory wall." His memories are, in fact, scenes from the earlier Karaoke. Aging Martina Masdon (Diane Ladd), the tyrannical owner of the Science Center, and international Murdoch-like media mogul David Siltz (Henry Goodman) see the potential for the commercial exploitation of Feeld's memories as entertainment.
As Siltz puts it, "Who would want made-up stories from a hack when you can mainline into the real thing? At last, privacy has a true market value." This is an intriguing notion, considering the rise of mobile webcam lifecasting in 2007, followed by the possibility of more reality TV shows triggered by the current Writer's Guild strike. (The long-run, unscripted Cops was launched by Fox in 1989 as a direct result of the 1988 writer's strike.) Lifecasters such as Sarah Meyers and Lisa Batey are skilled at sharing their inner thoughts with their viewers, sometimes verbalizing an ongoing stream-of-consciousness with surfacing memories. Lifecasting is a new medium that would have fascinated Dennis Potter. How will the corporate suits attempt to exploit the lifecasters?
This clip from Cold Lazarus incorporates scenes from Karaoke. The note on YouTube that Potter appears in this clip is obviously incorrect, since Potter was dead when Karaoke and Cold Lazarus were produced. That's actually the actor Ian McDiarmid (who portrayed Palpatine in the Star Wars series) as a character named Oliver Morse. McDiarmid has a striking physical resemblance to Potter, moreso when wearing glasses identical to Potter's, and his appearance makes this scene like Chinese nesting boxes... dialogue written by Feeld (and thusly Potter) is being overheard in a cafe by two different surrogate Potters. In another shot in the cafe (not in this clip), McDiarmid stares straight down into cream swirling in a coffee cup, momentarily suggesting Potter's Cream in My Coffee (1980), which we wrote about four months ago.
Dennis Potter disliked Rupert Murdoch so much that he gave the name "Rupert" to his cancer. In the weeks before his death (June 7, 1994), Potter was writing ten pages a day in a desperate attempt to complete his last two teleplays, the interlinked Karaoke and Cold Lazarus, before he died. On Without Walls (April 5, 1994) Potter took swigs from a flask of liquid morphine while he was interviewed by Melvyn Bragg, possibly the most unforgettable interview ever done for television. Potter talked with Bragg about his impending demise in a casual, celebratory fashion, seeing the world in a different way and marveling at the "nowness" of it 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 a 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 interview was the polar opposite of the last interview with dying, crying Peanuts cartoonist Charles Schulz shown near the end of last week's American Masters profile of Schulz on PBS. The documentary revealed how Schulz incorporated his own past into his comic strip, just as Potter reworked his life into The Singing Detective and other teleplays. Possibly Schulz was crying after a lifetime of seeing writers misspell his name as "Schultz." Even PBS couldn't get it right. (It's sort of like the mistake of adding a dot to "Dr Pepper".)
In this clip Potter tells Bragg about virtual reality and the other concepts that prompted the futuristic science fiction drama, Cold Lazarus (1996), his final work for television.
In Potter's Karaoke (1996), obsessive, self-destructive London television scriptwriter Daniel Feeld (Albert Finney) finds his health failing while involved with the post-production on his new TV drama, Karaoke. Potter was dying, and so is Feeld. The name is an obvious pun on "Potter's Field," yet as Richard Corliss has noted, it is the landscape of Potter's entire life. A hard-drinking heavy smoker, Feeld is in much physical pain as he struggles with pancreatic cancer. Going about his daily routines, he has some odd experiences leading him to conclude that his fictional creations are erupting into real life.
He overhears people speaking scraps of his own dialogue, including young Sandra Sollars (Saffron Burrows), hostess at a karaoke club run by petty thug Arthur "Pig" Maillion (Hywel Bennett). Feeld fears Sandra could be threatened by "Pig" Maillion in a manner similar to scenes he wrote for Karaoke, as his memory, fantasy and reality overlap and interweave into a complex mental tapestry that takes the viewer back to Potter's earlier works, Pennies from Heaven (1981) and The Singing Detective (1986). At the karaoke club, Feeld sings "Pennies from Heaven." "Stars in My Crown," the hymn Potter recalled from his childhood and featured prominently in The Singing Detective, is referenced in Karaoke, in Cold Lazarus and also in John Turturro's Potter-influenced Romance and Cigarettes (2005). It seems likely that, in his teens, Potter saw the movie Stars in My Crown (1950), starring Joel McCrea as the minister in a small frontier community after the Civil War.
Feeld returns three centuries later as a disembodied head in Cold Lazarus. While technology has advanced in the 24th Century, global corporate control has brought about an austere, antiseptic way of life. In the year 2368, the Luddites of the terrorist organization RON (Reality or Nothing) seek a return to the tranquility of earlier times.
At the Masdon Science Center, a team of scientists led by Emma Porlock (Frances De La Tour) work to extract memories from Feeld's cryogenically preserved head. The scientists glide about their lab in chairs which respond to their thoughts of movement and direction. Porlock says, "We can break into this man’s synapses. Imagine the wonder of it all. And if we wear our VR helmets we will live for hours at a time in the real past, the authentic past – and perhaps escape."When they finally succeed, they watch in awe as Feeld's memories are displayed on the large "memory wall." His memories are, in fact, scenes from the earlier Karaoke. Aging Martina Masdon (Diane Ladd), the tyrannical owner of the Science Center, and international Murdoch-like media mogul David Siltz (Henry Goodman) see the potential for the commercial exploitation of Feeld's memories as entertainment.
As Siltz puts it, "Who would want made-up stories from a hack when you can mainline into the real thing? At last, privacy has a true market value." This is an intriguing notion, considering the rise of mobile webcam lifecasting in 2007, followed by the possibility of more reality TV shows triggered by the current Writer's Guild strike. (The long-run, unscripted Cops was launched by Fox in 1989 as a direct result of the 1988 writer's strike.) Lifecasters such as Sarah Meyers and Lisa Batey are skilled at sharing their inner thoughts with their viewers, sometimes verbalizing an ongoing stream-of-consciousness with surfacing memories. Lifecasting is a new medium that would have fascinated Dennis Potter. How will the corporate suits attempt to exploit the lifecasters?
This clip from Cold Lazarus incorporates scenes from Karaoke. The note on YouTube that Potter appears in this clip is obviously incorrect, since Potter was dead when Karaoke and Cold Lazarus were produced. That's actually the actor Ian McDiarmid (who portrayed Palpatine in the Star Wars series) as a character named Oliver Morse. McDiarmid has a striking physical resemblance to Potter, moreso when wearing glasses identical to Potter's, and his appearance makes this scene like Chinese nesting boxes... dialogue written by Feeld (and thusly Potter) is being overheard in a cafe by two different surrogate Potters. In another shot in the cafe (not in this clip), McDiarmid stares straight down into cream swirling in a coffee cup, momentarily suggesting Potter's Cream in My Coffee (1980), which we wrote about four months ago.
Labels: cold lazarus, dennis potter, karaoke, melvyn bragg, rupert murdoch, without walls
¶ 10:01 AM 1 comments
Thursday, August 23, 2007
Dennis Potter's Cream in My Coffee (1980)
Cream in My Coffee is one of my favorite Dennis Potter teleplays, shot on location by Potter's own production company, PFH, for London Weekend Television. An elderly married couple, Bernard and June (Lionel Jeffries, Peggy Ashcroft), revisits the Grand Hotel in Eastbourne, East Sussex. During the 1930s, prior to their marriage, they had stayed there in a room overlooking the swimming pool.
With the young Bernard (Peter Chelsom) called away, June (Shelagh McLeod) deals with the advances of an apparent precursor to Potter's Singing Detective, the hotel's big-band crooner Jack Butcher (Martin Shaw), who sings "You're the Cream in My Coffee" and other tunes from the period. The sound of wooden handles on cords dangling and clicking at the window is Potter's transitional device for interweaving past and present. Destiny made audible, "like someone tapping on the lid of your coffin." Peggy Ashcroft won a BAFTA Award for her performance. Dennis Potter on DVD
With the young Bernard (Peter Chelsom) called away, June (Shelagh McLeod) deals with the advances of an apparent precursor to Potter's Singing Detective, the hotel's big-band crooner Jack Butcher (Martin Shaw), who sings "You're the Cream in My Coffee" and other tunes from the period. The sound of wooden handles on cords dangling and clicking at the window is Potter's transitional device for interweaving past and present. Destiny made audible, "like someone tapping on the lid of your coffin." Peggy Ashcroft won a BAFTA Award for her performance. Dennis Potter on DVD
The Grand Hotel in Eastbourne
Labels: coffee, cream, dennis potter, hotel
¶ 9:20 PM 0 comments
