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Private Notes
Writing for ITV Sunday Night Theatre (1969), Dennis Potter introduced the notion that popular music expresses the yearning of the human spirit for a better world. A troubled young man, David Peters (Ian Holm), claims, "Once dreams were possible, that's what the popular songs told us." Rejecting rock music of the day, Peters is immersed in the tunes of Thirties crooner Al Bowlly (killed during the London blitz). He collects Bowlly memorabilia, publishes the Bowlly fan-club newsletter, and finds pleasure in lip-synching Bowlly records but his obsession with Bowlly masks certain darker events in his past.
Dennis Potter used his own background as a Russian language clerk in the War Office when writing this play for ITV's SATURDAY NIGHT THEATRE series. At the time of the 1956 Suez Crisis and ...
A door-to-door salesman is selling nothing tangible, but something far more worrying.
Set in a city comprehensive school of low expectations and ambitions. Pupil Latimer does not conform to the macho culture and is labeled a homosexual, leading to bullying by both the pupils and some of the teachers.
Victorian London, midnight, mist swirling through the darkened streets, and a terrifying cry. The classic ingredients of the classic murder story.
The setting is a Fleet Street newspaper office, probably based on the sort of tabloid experience Potter had known while working for the Daily Herald which was later to become the Sun. Clarence Hubbard (berated by his fellow hacks as "Old Mother") is coasting towards retirement but harks back to the good old days of his long journalistic career. These days he is fobbed off with trivial assignments though he rings in his stories with all the enthusiasm he had once brought to more significant copy in the past. Nowadays he is limited to obituaries and horoscopes. Potter employs a wide range of non-naturalistic devices to unsettle the audience and to give them an entry into Clarence's head. Flashbacks take us to earlier successes Clarence has gathered; freeze-frame caricatures of pressmen are punctuated by voice-over and graphic tabloid headlines. Towards the end of the play Hubbard orders all the cuttings of his old stories to be brought up from the library. He then proceeds to throw them all out of the top-storey window and, in his final act of defiance, storms out of the office to take the lift out of the building. Unfortunately, the lift is under repair and is not there. Hubbard plummets down the shaft to his death. Throughout the play we have been introduced to an inattentive viewer who has apparently been watching Paper Roses on his TV set at home. He turns out to be a television critic for a national newspaper. He offers us his review in the following terms: "Last night's TV play, Paper Roses, gave us about as true a picture of popular newspapers as a funfair distorting mirror ... We are told the author used to work in Fleet Street but if this led any viewer to think that the sour caricature on the screen was based on real experience of real journalists, he has only to open this morning's newspapers to see how ludicrous the idea really is. Full stop. End." (cited in Cook 1995: 68)
Another Sunday and Sweet F.A. is a television play (a one-off drama) written by Jack Rosenthal and directed by Michael Apted which was first broadcast on 9 January 1972 in Granada Television's Sunday Night Theatre strand. It stars David Swift, Freddie Fletcher, and Gordon McGrase. It also features Anne Kirkbride, who as a result of her performance was cast in Coronation Street in the role of Deirdre Barlow. The play won the TV Critics' Circle Best Play of the Year Award.
Roger Empson builds a house for his disabled wife Jean that is completely automated and monitored by a computer called A.D.A.M. (Automated Domestic Appliance Monitor). When she was a child, Jean had imagined that her dolls used to love her. Now, events take a nasty turn when Jean starts imagining that A.D.A.M. is falling in love with her.
