John Birt, Baron Birt (born 10 December 1944) is a former Director-General of the BBC who was in the post from 1992 to 2000.

After a successful career in commercial television, first at Granada and then at LWT, Birt was brought in as Deputy Director-General of the BBC in 1987 for his current affairs expertise. The forced departure of Director-General Alasdair Milne following pressure from the Thatcher government^[1] required someone at the top, preferably from outside the corporation, with editorial and production experience: Milne had been summarily replaced by Michael Checkland, an accountant.

Birt was credited with re-structuring the BBC in accordance with Conservative Party privatisation policies, but in the face of much internal opposition. His supporters insist he saved the corporation from possible government sell-off, and properly equipped it to face the digital age. Birt later became an adviser to the Blair government.

Early life and commercial television career[link]

John Birt was born in Liverpool to a Catholic father, a manager at the Firestone tire company, and a Protestant mother. He was raised as a Roman Catholic. Birt was educated at the direct-grant grammar school St Mary's College, Liverpool and St Catherine's College, Oxford, where he got a third-class degree in engineering.

From 1966 to 1971 Birt was at Granada Television. He devised the magazine programme Nice Time and, as a researcher at World in Action, staged in July 1967 a melodramatic post-trial encounter between Mick Jagger and senior figures in the British establishment. Jagger, just released following drugs charges, descended from a helicopter to discuss on the lawn matters of the day with, among others, the editor of The Times William Rees-Mogg, and the Bishop of Woolwich John A. T. Robinson.

Birt in 1969 became joint editor of World in Action with Gus McDonald, a former Trotskyist, later himself to become a government minister and a member of the House of Lords. Birt later moved to LWT, where he was founding editor of the current affairs programme Weekend World. He became head of current affairs at LWT and, later, controller of features and current affairs. In the mid-1970s he took a break from LWT to produce David Frost's interviews with disgraced former US President Richard Nixon. Birt returned to LWT as director of programmes in 1982. During this period he revived the career of his old friend, the Liverpool singer Cilla Black, who in due course became the highest paid female performer on UK television.

Birt formed a close working relationship with his boss at LWT, Michael Grade, which would later go sour when both worked at the BBC.^[2]

BBC career[link]

While deputy director-general under Michael Checkland, a former accountant, Birt also served as the BBC's director of news and current affairs. Then and subsequently, in the wake of the Thatcher government's bitter spats with Milne, he became the most hands-on editor-in-chief in the corporation's history.

With the then Weekend World presenter Peter Jay, Birt had in 1974 contributed to The Times a series of three much-discussed articles on the topic of television journalism. Most television news and current affairs contained, they argued, a "bias against understanding": mere pictures had taken precedence over analysis. They advocated instead what became known as "a mission to explain." The model was Weekend World.

In accordance with this thesis and, no doubt, with Milne's earlier agonies in mind, makers of news and documentary programmes were required to outline their finished product in writing before setting out with the cameras. The news correspondent Kate Adie considered such methods were at odds with the "obligation to report".^[3] Fred Emery a former presenter of Panorama, a direct rival to Weekend World and thus a prime test-bed for the new supervised approach, said it gave rise to "a certain blandness".

Shortly after arriving at the BBC, in July 1987, Birt held a conference at Lime Grove Studios with the BBC’s current affairs journalists in which he was questioned vigorously by Charles Wheeler, one of the BBC’s longest-serving reporters, about what he meant by the BBC’s lack of analysis in its news reporting. Panorama producer David Wickham, also at the conference, later described Birt in an interview as “phenomenally arrogant”.^[4]

Birt's promotion to Director-General in 1992 caused immediate controversy. On top of all the internal opposition, it was then revealed that, though Director-General, Birt was being employed on a freelance consultancy basis in order to write-off numerous personal expenses against tax, including "secretarial services" from his wife. While perfectly acceptable in the private sector, such practices were considered unacceptable in a Director-General of the BBC. Under political and public pressure, Birt became a BBC employee. He had to sell his shares in LWT, part of his final salary settlement with the company. When in 1994 LWT was bought by Granada, Birt lost out on a windfall of what would have been several million pounds.

Consistent with Conservative Party policy, Birt introduced a "virtual internal market" at the BBC. Individual departments were required to charge each other for services, and even to compete against each other for contracts. Under what was called the "Producer Choice" initiative, programme producers were required to use outside suppliers if they were cheaper. Faced with high rental fees from the BBC's record library, producers for a time found it cheaper to buy records from local record shops. In-house facilities were closed or stood idle as a result, it was alleged, of "creative accounting" methods. Apparently unprofitable departments, including the Radiophonic Workshop, were suddenly axed after decades of service. Birt's use of impenetrable jargon became known as "Birtspeak", a phenomenon still regularly mocked in the satirical magazine Private Eye, complete with miniature Dalek caricature of the man himself.

The allusion to Birt and Daleks has stuck. Originating from a speech Dennis Potter gave at the Edinburgh Television Festival less than a year before his death, Britain's foremost television playwright, labeled Birt a "croak-voiced Dalek".^[5] Potter's comments were not universally admired though. Television critic Mark Lawson, then of The Independent, wrote of Potter's "tendency towards unfocused vitriol and noisy self-examination made his contribution easily swattable by the BBC's damage controllers and ignorable by the wider audience."^[6]

In the 1993 Christmas tape produced by the BBC's post production department, Birt was portrayed as the Daleks' creator, Davros.^[7] Former BBC director and producer David Maloney claimed on the DVD commentary for Genesis of the Daleks that John Birt "succeeded where Davros failed and ruined the BBC".

Former BBC Director-General Alasdair Milne described Birt as “the most graceless man I have ever known” and a “ghastly man” who did little good for the BBC except establishing the BBC’s Internet service. He also criticised him for paying consultants a lot of money to restructure the corporation.^[8] Bill Cotton described Birt’s tenure as a “nightmare” for the BBC.^[9] Radio broadcaster John Dunn said of Birt: “I certainly don't like what Birt has done to the surroundings in which I work. The atmosphere is terrible, morale is bad."^[10] David Attenborough commented: “When Birt gets up and says the whole of the BBC was a creative mess and it was wasteful, I never saw any evidence of that. I absolutely know it wasn’t so in my time. Producers now spend all their time worrying about money, and the thing has suffered for it.”^[11] Barry Norman wrote in his memoirs: “I left the BBC in the summer of 1998. I wasn’t unhappy there at the time but I was certainly less happy than I had been. Everyone was. Something had happened to the BBC - John Birt had happened. He had been brought in a few years earlier as Director-General, charged with making the organization more efficient and cost-effective and in that I’m sure he succeeded. But his greatest achievement - and it took some doing - was to assume control of the broadcasting organization for which everyone in the country, and many people outside it, wanted to work and within six months make the entire workforce fearful and unsettled. The confident security which in my time there had made the BBC innovative and admired throughout the world seemed to vanish overnight. There were redundancies and downsizing; staff members who retired or left for other jobs were replaced by people on contract, often short-term contract, and it’s difficult to build a career, or a life, like that.” Norman also commented that Birt’s policies led to the BBC playing safe with programme ideas and filling the schedules with “a plethora of cookery programmes, gardening programmes, quiz shows and game shows. There is very little on the BBC right now that you can’t find replicated on the commercial channels because the bottom line is cost and ratings”.^[12] Even Marmaduke Hussey, who appointed Birt to his BBC role, later claimed to have regrets: "If I'd been reappointed as chairman I would have got rid of him. I had chosen a man who did not have the two prime skills of managing and getting on with staff. He totally failed to take the BBC with him.” He said Birt was "dogmatic and difficult" and that although he had some fine qualities, "admitting others may be right was not one of them".^[13]

Birt's changes were partially dismantled by his successors Greg Dyke, himself sacked following pressure from the Blair government, and Mark Thompson. However, veteran producer Tony Garnett claimed in 2009 that Birt's legacy of “totalitarian micro management” has existed at the BBC ever since. He said of Birt: “After John Birt achieved power, centralisation was accelerated. Birt had consultants all over the BBC like a rash. As an institution it fitted in perfectly with the ideology of the day. It is no accident that Birt's two jobs since have been at number 10 and at McKinsey's”. He conceded: “He was resolute and brave in his attempts to bring some proper financial discipline. He was percipient about New Media and the imminent upheavals the Internet would bring and made sure that the BBC had a head start”, but he also had “a leadership bypass, an inability to charm and persuade” and his faith in out of date management theories about structure led to “just more irrelevant bureaucratic supervision from senior management ... This sort of control is the enemy of creativity."^[14]

Birt's defenders include the prominent journalists John Lloyd and Polly Toynbee.^[15] It has been argued that without his reforms and his ability to accommodate the Thatcher government,^[16] the renewal of the BBC's operating charter in the 1990s was in jeopardy. Birt was responsible for modernisation of much BBC output, including the removal from BBC Radio 1 of veteran disc jockeys such as Dave Lee Travis and Simon Bates. Radio 1 re-branded itself as more youth-oriented, but the station's audience total declined nonetheless.

Birt invested heavily in digital broadcasting and sought government approval to direct licence fee money into the new internet service bbc.co.uk. Such ventures were at the time criticised by some as being to the detriment of the BBC's core programming. John Tusa, a former boss of the BBC World Service said, "You have to love an organisation in order to reform it."

In 1998 BBC programme makers were ordered to refrain from any mention of the private life of the cabinet minister Peter Mandelson. In a live interview on BBC television's Newsnight the journalist and former Conservative MP Matthew Parris had identified Mandelson as a fellow homosexual. Mandelson, a former editor of Weekend World, and Birt had been colleagues at LWT. There was press speculation that Birt himself had initiated the directive.

Birt was awarded a knighthood, and in 1999 a life peerage.^[17] He took his seat in the House of Lords in March 2000 as a crossbencher.

Post-BBC career[link]

In 2001 Tony Blair appointed Birt as his personal advisor, for what was termed "Blue Skies thinking";^[18][19] it is thought his long-standing friendship with Peter Mandelson had a role in his appointment.^[20] His role in government was controversial, since as a special advisor, rather than a civil servant, he is not formally obliged to face questions from House of Commons Select committees. In October 2002 an uproar was created when it emerged that the government had specifically asked him not to appear in front of the transport select committee, at a time when he was in charge of long-term transport strategy. Earlier that year, a paper of Birt's had proposed a second network of motorways operated as tolls to counter the problems of traffic congestion.^[21] In parallel, he subsequently become a part-time consultant with McKinsey & Company, which some see as a conflict of interest with his government involvement. In December 2005 he quit his role as advisor to Tony Blair to join private equity firm Terra Firma Capital Partners, "for personal reasons". In addition to his unpaid work with the UK government Birt also had a paid role at McKinsey & Co in their Media and Entertainment Practice. Birt's relationship with government and McKisney caused some controversy as McKinsey were increasingly working with UK government departments in a range of public service and defence areas.^[22]

Since February 2004, Birt has been on the board of PayPal Europe.

The Financial Times reported at the beginning of July 2005 that Birt's office ceiling at No 10 Downing Street had fallen in. However, Birt was not injured.^[23]

Returning to his earlier career on 26 August 2005, Birt delivered his second MacTaggart lecture at the Edinburgh International Television Festival. Partly a review of his professional life as a broadcaster, he also criticised the "tabloidisation" of intellectual concerns. More importantly, he argued that Channel Four should receive financial help, in order to preserve "public service broadcasting", which was taken as advocacy of the BBC sharing its licence fee with Channel Four. He also mentioned that his long standing feud with Michael Grade had been resolved, but the speech as a whole was not admired by many figures in the industry.^[24]

In 2006, Lord Birt joined the consulting firm Capgemini. He will advise the firm, with a focus on its consulting services in the public sector and telecom, media and entertainment.^[25]

He is currently working with renewable power company Infinis.

Private life[link]

John Birt's first wife was the American-born Jane Lake. They met in 1963, whilst she was an art student at Oxford. The couple married in Washington, D.C. in 1965, and have two children, Eliza and Yahya (formerly Jonathan) Birt.

In April 2005, Birt admitted a twelve-month affair with Eithne Wallis, a divorced mother of three and a former head of the National Probation Service.^[26] Birt admitted adultery in his court papers.

Birt and Wallis' marriage took place on 16 December 2006 at Islington Register Office. It was attended by neither set of children. A reception was held after the ceremony at the fashionable London St John restaurant in Smithfield,^[27] attended by, among others, the politician Peter Mandelson and Trevor Philips, chairman of the Commission for Equalities and Human Rights, both former colleagues at LWT.

Portrayals in fiction[link]

In the 2007 play Frost/Nixon on Broadway, Birt was played by actor Rene Auberjonois. In the 2008 film adaptation Frost/Nixon, he was played by Matthew Macfadyen.

Bibliography[link]

• John Birt (2002). The Harder Path. Time Warner Books. ISBN 0-316-86019-0. 
• Georgina Born (2004). Uncertain Vision: Birt, Dyke and the Reinvention of the BBC. Secker & Warburg. ISBN 0-436-20562-9. 

References[link]

External links[link]

• John Birt's MacTaggart Lecture 2005
• New Statesman interview with John Birt, June 21, 1996 by Ian Hargreaves
• Review of John Birt's The Harder Path by Peter Bazalgette in The Observer, October 27, 2002
• Announcement of his introduction at the House of Lords

Dennis Christopher George Potter (17 May 1935 – 7 June 1994) was an English television dramatist, screenwriter and journalist.

Beginning with contributions to BBC television's The Wednesday Play anthology series from 1965, he peaked with The Singing Detective (1986), a BBC TV serial for which he is most remembered. This work and many of his other widely acclaimed television dramas mixed fantasy and reality, the personal and the social and often used themes and images from popular culture. A psoriatic arthropathy sufferer for most of his adult life, Potter made regular public pronouncements on issues dear to him.

Early life[link]

Dennis Potter was born in Berry Hill, Forest of Dean, Gloucestershire. His father, Walter Edward Potter (1906 – November 1975),^[1] was a coal miner in this rural mining area between Gloucester and Wales; his mother was Margaret Constance, née Wale (born 1910). Potter has a sister named June.^[2]

Brought up a Protestant he attended the local Salem chapel, and went to Christchurch Junior School where, in 1946, he passed the eleven-plus entrance examination to Bell's Grammar School at Coleford. He then went to St. Clement Danes School in London, while the family lived for a time with his maternal grandfather in Hammersmith. During this time the ten year old Potter was sexually abused by his uncle, an experience he would later allude to many times in his writing.^[3] Between 1953 and 1955, Potter did his National Service and learnt Russian at the Joint Services School for Linguists, serving with the Intelligence Corps and subsequently at the War Office.^[4]

After national service, in 1956, he won a scholarship and went to New College, Oxford to study Politics, Philosophy and Economics, editing the student magazine Isis. He graduated in 1958, after obtaining a second-class degree. A tall, lean young man with red hair, he was described by his economics tutor as a "cross between Jimmy Porter and Keir Hardie".^[5]

On 10 January 1959 he married at the Christchurch parish church Margaret Amy Morgan (1933–1994), a local girl he met at a dance.^[4] They lived a "surprisingly quiet private life" at Ross-on-Wye, Herefordshire, and had a son, Robert and two daughters, Jane and Sarah, who was to achieve prominence in the 1980s as an international cricketer.

Early career[link]

After Oxford, Potter joined the BBC, initially as a trainee in radio and then television journalism, during which time he worked on Panorama including front of camera work on his personal film "Between Two Rivers" (1960) which is about the closure of coalpits in the Forest of Dean. He did not take to television journalism though, and joined the Daily Herald newspaper. From August 1961 he became a television critic for the Herald and its successor, The Sun in its pre-Murdoch incarnation.

Potter's first non-fiction work, The Glittering Coffin, was published by the Gollancz Press in 1960. The book was a rumination on the changing face of England in the prosperity following the end of the war years. It was followed by The Changing Forest: Life in the Forest of Dean Today (1962), which was based on the "Between Two Rivers" documentary. This book is a study of class and social mobility that demonstrates an early fascination with the effects of the mass media on British cultural life. Apart from his newspaper columns for the Daily Herald and The Sun, originally published by the International Press Corporation.

He soon returned to television though. Herald journalist David Nathan persuaded Potter to collaborate with him on sketches for That Was The Week That Was. Their first piece was used in the edition of 5 January 1963.^[6]

Potter stood as the Labour Party candidate for Hertfordshire East, a safe Conservative Party seat, in the 1964 general election against the incumbent Derek Walker-Smith. By the end of the campaign, he claimed that he was so disillusioned with party politics he did not even vote for himself. His candidacy was unsuccessful.

In 1962 Potter had begun to suffer from an acute form of psoriasis known as psoriatic arthropathy that affected his skin and caused arthritis in his joints. It also made a conventional career path impossible. Potter embarked on a career as a television playwright, largely after being inspired by the Granada version of Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace (1963), based on Erwin Piscator's stage production. He wrote in the Daily Herald that it was "surely the most exciting evening that TV has ever given us",^[7]

Writing and public career[link]

Television[link]

Potter's career as a television playwright began with The Confidence Course, an exposé of the Dale Carnegie Institute that drew threats of litigation. Although Potter effectively disowned the play, it is notable for its use of non-naturalistic dramatic devices (in this case breaking the fourth wall) which would become hallmarks of Potter's subsequent work. Broadcast as part of the BBC's The Wednesday Play strand early in 1965, The Confidence Course proved successful and Potter was commissioned to make further contributions. His next play, Alice (1965), was a controversial drama chronicling the relationship between Lewis Carroll and his muse Alice Liddell. Potter's most highly regarded works from this period are the semi-autobiographical plays Stand Up, Nigel Barton! and Vote, Vote, Vote for Nigel Barton. The former recounts the experience of a miner's son going to Oxford University where he finds himself torn between two worlds, culminating in Barton's participation in a television documentary. This mirrored his creator's participation in Does Class Matter (1958), a television documentary made while Potter was an Oxford undergraduate.^[8] The second play featured the same character standing as a Labour candidate — his disillusionment with the compromises of electoral politics is based on Potter's own experience.^[9] Both plays received praise from critics' circles but aroused considerable tension at the BBC for their potentially incendiary critique of party politics.^[9] In his James MacTaggart Memorial Lecture in 1993, Potter recalled how he was asked by "several respected men at the corporation why I wanted to shit on the Queen" (Occupying Powers, 1993)

After several poorly received projects, Potter contributed Moonlight on the Highway to ITV's Saturday Night Theatre strand broadcast on 12 April 1969. The play centred around a young man who attempts to blot out memories of the sexual abuse he had suffered as child in his obsession with the music of Al Bowlly. As well as being an intensely personal play for Potter, it was his first foray in the use of popular music to heighten the dramatic tension in his work. Four days later Potter's Son of Man went out as a Wednesday Play on BBC1 with the Irish actor Colin Blakely in the lead role of Jesus in which the dramatist gives an alternative view of Christ's last days. It led to Potter being accused of blasphemy, and the first of many clashes with morality campaigner Mary Whitehouse. The script of Son of Man, mostly written in hospital, was delivered with drops of blood and cortisone grease splashed upon it.

Casanova, Potter's first television serial, was broadcast on BBC2 in 1971. Inspired by William R. Trask's 1966 translation of Casanova's memoirs (Histoire de ma vie), Potter recast the Venetian libertine as a man haunted by his dependency on women.^[10] The serial was told using a non-linear narrative structure and, as the critic Graham Fuller noted in Potter on Potter, "as chamber-piece and identity quest, Casanova strongly anticipates [later works such as] The Singing Detective." It did, however, prove controversial for its frank depiction of nudity and was criticized for its sexual content. Controversy also dogged another play, Brimstone and Treacle (Play for Today, 1976), the original version was unscreened by the BBC for over a decade owing to the depiction of the rape of a disabled woman by a man who is implied to be the devil incarnate. It was eventually broadcast on BBC2 in 1987, although a 1982 film version had been made, with Sting in the leading role (see below) and a stage version performed in Sheffield at the Crucible Theatre.

Potter continued to make news as well as winning critical acclaim for drama serials with Pennies From Heaven (1978), which featured Bob Hoskins as a sheet music salesman and was Hoskins's first performance to receive wide attention. It demonstrated the dramatic possibilities old recordings of popular songs. Blue Remembered Hills was first shown on the BBC on 30 January 1979; it returned to the British small screen at Christmas 2004, and again in the summer of 2005, showcased as part of the winning decade (1970s) having been voted by BBC Four viewers as the golden era of British television. The adult actors playing the roles of children were Helen Mirren, Janine Duvitski, Michael Elphick, Colin Jeavons, Colin Welland, John Bird, and Robin Ellis. It was directed by Brian Gibson. The moralistic theme was "the child is father of the man". Potter had used the dramatic device of adult actors playing children before, for example in Stand Up, Nigel Barton.

A lucrative deal with LWT, and semi-independence, followed an aborted project to adapt Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time for the BBC. A series of six single plays by Potter for ITV, with a further three written by Jim Allen, was planned. Budget overspends meant only three of the Potter plays were produced: the BAFTA-winning Blade on the Feather, Rain on the Roof and Cream in My Coffee, which won Grand Prize at the Prix Italia.

He also wrote the scripts for the widely praised but seldom seen miniseries of F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night (1985) with Mary Steenburgen as Nicole Diver.

The Singing Detective (1986), featuring Michael Gambon, used the dramatist's own battle with the skin disease psoriasis, for him an often debilitating condition, as a means to merge the lead character's imagination with his perception of reality.

Potter's TV serial, Blackeyes (1989, also a novel- see below), a drama about a fashion model was reviewed as self-indulgent by some critics, and accused of contributing to the misogyny Potter claimed he intended to expose.^[11] The critical backlash against Potter following Blackeyes led to him being nicknamed 'Dirty Den' by the British tabloid press,^[12] after the soap opera character, and resulted in a long period of reclusion from television. In 1990 Mary Whitehouse claimed on BBC Radio that Potter had been influenced by witnessing his mother engaged in adulterous sex. Potter's mother won substantial damages from the BBC^[13] and The Listener.^[14] Potter was actually an admirer of Mrs Whitehouse. The journalist Stanley Reynolds found in 1973 that he "loves the idea of Mrs Whitehouse. He sees her as standing up for all the people with ducks on their walls who have been laughed at and treated like rubbish by the sophisticated metropolitan minority."^[15]

In 1992 he directed a film, Secret Friends (from his novel, Ticket to Ride), starring Alan Bates. Secret Friends premiered in New York at the Museum of Modern Art as the gala closing of the Museum of Television & Radio’s week-long Potter retrospective. Potter proposed to write an "intermedia" stage play for Geisler-Roberdeau based on William Hazlitt’s Liber Amoris, or The New Pygmalion, but he died before it could be commenced. Potter's romantic comedy Lipstick on Your Collar (1993) was a return to more conventional themes and the familiar format of six hour-long episodes, but did not become the desired popular success, although it helped launch the career of Ewan McGregor.^[11]

Film[link]

In 1978, Herbert Ross was shooting Nijinsky at Shepperton Studios and invited Potter to write the screenplay for his next project Unexpected Valleys. After watching Pennies from Heaven on television one evening, Ross contacted Potter about the prospect of adapting it for the cinema.^[16] The project was launched at MGM as an 'anti-musical' with Steve Martin and Bernadette Peters in the lead roles. According to Potter, the studio demanded continual rewrites of the script and made significant cuts to the film after initial test screenings. The film was released in 1981 to mixed critical reaction and was a box office disaster. Potter was, however, nominated for the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar that year alongside Harold Pinter for The French Lieutenant's Woman.

Having already adapted Brimstone and Treacle for the stage after the television production was banned by the BBC, Potter set about writing a film version. Directed by Richard Loncraine, who also directed Potter's Blade on the Feather at LWT, the film featured a soundtrack by The Police while Sting played the role of the devil; Denholm Elliot reprised his role from the original television production playing Mr Bates while Joan Plowright took the Patricia Lawrence role as Mrs Bates. Although a British film made by Potter's own production company (Pennies Productions), the casting of Sting piqued the interest of American investors. As a result, references to Mr Bates' membership of the National Front and a scene discussing racial segregation were omitted —as were many of the non-naturalistic flourishes that dominated the television production— although, ironically, the film was much more graphic in its depiction of sexual abuse and rape. The film though was not a success at the box office, but Sting's cover of "Spread a Little Happiness" reached number sixteen in the UK Singles Chart.

Potter's screenplay for Gorky Park (1983) earned him an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America, although it emerged as a shadow of Martin Cruz Smith's original novel. He also wrote the screenplay for Dreamchild (1985), a cinematic adaptation of his earlier Alice script. In her last film role, Coral Browne portrayed the elderly Alice Hargreaves who recalls in flashbacks her childhood when she was the inspiration for Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. In 1987, he adapted his television play Schmoedipus (1975) for the cinema. The ensuing film, Track 29, directed by Nicolas Roeg, was the last project Potter would pursue in Hollywood. However, Potter did provide uncredited script work on James and the Giant Peach (released 1995) — his chief contribution providing dialogue for the sardonic caterpillar. Potter makes a sly reference to this in Karaoke when the character Daniel Feeld (Albert Finney) is invited to provide dialogue for an "arthritic goat" in a children's film.

Potter's reputation within the American film industry following the box office disappointments of Pennies from Heaven and Gorky Park ultimately led to difficulty receiving backing for his projects. Potter is known to have written adaptations of The Phantom of the Opera, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, The White Hotel and his own 1976 television play Double Dare: all reaching the preproduction stage before work was suspended. More fortunate was Mesmer (1993), a biographical film of 19th century pseudo-scientist Franz Anton Mesmer.

The last film Potter actively worked on was Midnight Movie (1994), an adaptation of Rosalind Ashe's novel Moths. The film starred Louise Germaine and Brian Dennehy (who had appeared in Lipstick on Your Collar and Gorky Park, respectively) and was directed by Renny Rye. Unable to secure financing from the Arts Council, Potter invested half a million pounds into the production; BBC Films provided the rest of the capital. The film was not given a cinema release owing to a lack of interest from distributors and remained unseen until after Potter's death. It was finally broadcast on BBC2 in December 1994 as part of a Screen Two season two months after a remake of his lost 1967 play Message for Posterity was transmitted.

A film version of The Singing Detective, based on Potter's own adapted screenplay, was released in 2003 by Icon Productions. Robert Downey, Jr. played the lead alongside Robin Wright Penn and Mel Gibson. Gibson also acted as producer.

The media and Rupert Murdoch[link]

In 1993 Potter was given a half hour in prime time by Channel 4 in their Opinions strand produced by Open Media. Broadcast just before the third episode of Lipstick on Your Collar, itself a rumination on the effects of the mass media, in this case through popular music, Potter's chosen topic was what he perceived to be a contamination of news media and its effect on declining standards in British television. Craig Brown described the programme in the (Murdoch owned) Sunday Times:

"Potter announced at the beginning: 'I'm going to get down there in the gutter where so many journalists crawl... what I'm about to do is to make a provenly vindictive and extremely powerful enemy... the enemy in question is that drivel-merchant, global huckster and so-to-speak media psychopath, Rupert Murdoch... Hannibal the Cannibal.'...

As a performance, it had a lot going for it. I have never seen a talking head on television so immediate or so unabated in its anger. In many ways, it felt like being collared by a madman on the Tube. Filmed disturbingly close to camera, seemingly ad-libbing the entire half-hour, now mumbling, now rasping, Potter somehow managed to cut through the vacuum that on television usually separates viewer from viewee. This made the performance extraordinary."^[17]

Last interview, final works, and death[link]

On 14 February 1994, Potter learned that he had terminal pancreatic cancer which had metastasised to his liver.^[11] It was thought that this was a side effect of the medication he was taking to control his psoriasis.

On 15 March 1994, three months before his death, Potter gave an interview to Melvyn Bragg, later broadcast on 5 April 1994 by Channel 4 (he had broken most of his ties with the BBC as a result of his disenchantment with Directors-General Michael Checkland and especially John Birt, whom he had famously referred to as a "croak-voiced Dalek"),^[18] Using a morphine cocktail as pain relief, he revealed that he had named his cancer "Rupert", after Rupert Murdoch, who he said represented so much of what he found despicable about the mass media in Britain.^[19] He described his work and his determination to continue writing until his death. Telling Melvyn Bragg that he had two works he intended to finish ("My only regret is if I die four pages too soon"), he proposed that these works, Cold Lazarus and Karaoke, should be made with the rival BBC and Channel 4 working in collaboration, a suggestion which was accepted.^[11]

These two related stories, eventually broadcast in 1996, one set in the present and the other in the far future, both feature Albert Finney as the same principal character. Both series were released on DVD release on 6 September 2010.

This unreferenced section requires citations to ensure verifiability.

Months before Potter was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer his wife, Margaret Morgan Potter, was diagnosed with breast cancer. Despite his own deteriorating condition and punishing work schedule, Potter continued to care for Margaret Amy Potter until she died on 29 May 1994.^[4] He died nine days later, in Ross-on-Wye, Herefordshire, England, aged 59.

Other works[link]

Novels[link]

Hide and Seek (1973) was a meta-fictional novel exploring the relationship between reader and author and contains a central protagonist, 'Daniel Miller', who is convinced he is the plaything of an omniscient author. This concept forms the core of Potter's next two novels, and portions of Hide and Seek would reappear in several of his television plays (most notably Follow the Yellow Brick Road and The Singing Detective, respectively).

Ticket to Ride (1986) was written between drafts of The Singing Detective and concerns a herbithologist who is unable to make love to his wife unless he imagines her as a prostitute. This was followed in 1987 by Blackeyes: a study of a model whose abusive uncle, a writer, has stolen details of his niece's experiences in the glamour industry as the basis for his latest potboiler.

To tie-in with the release of the MGM production of Pennies from Heaven in 1981, Potter wrote a novelisation of the screenplay. Potter turned down the option of writing a novelisation for the film version of Brimstone and Treacle, allowing his daughter Sarah to write it instead.

Stage plays[link]

Although Potter only produced one play exclusively for theatrical performance (Sufficient Carbohydrate, 1983 – later filmed for television as Visitors in 1987), he adapted several of his television works for the stage. Vote, Vote, Vote for Nigel Barton, which featured material from its sister-play Stand Up, Nigel Barton, was premiered in 1966, while Only Make Believe, which incorporated scenes from Angels Are So Few, made the transition to the stage in 1974. Son of Man appeared in 1969 with Frank Finlay in the title role (Finlay would also play Casanova in Potter's 1971 serial) and was restaged by Northern Stage in 2006.^[20] Brimstone and Treacle was adapted for the stage in 1977 after the BBC refused to screen the original television version. The play text for Blue Remembered Hills was first published in the collection Waiting for the Boat (with Joe's Ark and Blade on the Feather) in 1984 and has since enjoyed several successful stage performances.

Style and themes[link]

Potter's work is distinctive for its use of non-naturalistic devices. The 'lip-sync' technique he developed for his "serials with songs" (Pennies from Heaven; The Singing Detective and Lipstick on Your Collar), extensive use of flashback and nonlinear plot structure (Casanova; Late Call), direct to camera address (Vote, Vote, Vote for Nigel Barton) and works where "the child is father to the man", in which he used adult actors to play children, (Stand Up, Nigel Barton; Blue Remembered Hills) have all become Potter trademarks. They are frequently deployed in works where the line between fantasy and reality becomes blurred, often as a result of the influence of popular culture (Willie, the Wild West obsessive played by Hywel Bennett in Where the Buffalo Roam) or from a character's apparent awareness of their status as a pawn in the hands of an omniscient author (the actor Jack Black (Denholm Elliot) in Follow the Yellow Brick Road).

Potter's pioneering method of using music in his work emerged when developing the ground-breaking 1978 drama Pennies from Heaven. He asked actors to mime along to period songs. "Potter tried out the concept himself by lip-syncing to old songs while looking into a mirror. Potter himself once revealed that, working on harnessing songs in his plays, he was most productive " at night, with old Al Bowlly records playing in the background."^[21] Potter had previously experimented with Bowlly's voice in Moonlight on the Highway (1969).

Following in this spirit of non-naturalism, Potter's characters are frequently "doubled up"; either by using the same actor to play two different roles (Kika Markham as the actress and escort in Double Dare; Norman Rossington as Lorenzo the gaoler and the English traveller in Casanova) or two different actors whose characters' destinies and personalities appear interlinked (Bob Hoskins and Kenneth Colley as Arthur and the accordion man in Pennies from Heaven; Rufus (Christian Rodska) and Gina the bear in A Beast With Two Backs).

One major motiff in Potter's writing is the concept of betrayal, and this takes many forms in his plays. Sometimes it is personal (Stand Up, Nigel Barton), political (Traitor; Cold Lazarus) and other times it is sexual (A Beast With Two Backs; Brimstone and Treacle). In Potter on Potter, published as part of Faber and Faber's series on auteurs, Potter told editor Graham Fuller that all forms of betrayal presented in literature are essentially religious and based on "the old, old story"; this is evoked in a number of works, from the use of popular songs in Pennies from Heaven to Potter's gnostic retelling of Jesus' final days in Son of Man.

The "Pinteresque" device of a disruptive outsider entering a claustrophobic environment is another recurring theme. In plays where this occurs, the outsider will commit some liberating act of sex (Rain on the Roof) or violence (Shaggy Dog) that gives physical expression to the unsublimated desires of the characters in that setting. While these more malevolent visitors are often supernatural beings (Angels Are So Few), intelligence agents (Blade on the Feather) or even figments of their host's imagination (Schmoedipus), there are also —rare— instances of benign visitors whose presence resolves personal conflicts rather than exploits them (Joe's Ark; Where Adam Stood).

Personal life[link]

Psoriatic arthropathy[link]

For the rest of his life, Potter was frequently in hospitals, sometimes completely unable to move and in great pain. The disease eventually ruined his hands, reducing them to what he called "clubs." He could only write by strapping a pen to his hand. Potter kept working between bouts of pain, nausea, and diarrhea, clutching a pen in his clawed fist and writing in longhand. "I can't use a typewriter," he said, "because my trailing fingers would hit more than one key at once."^[22]

Criticism[link]

This unreferenced section requires citations to ensure verifiability.

Potter was sometimes attacked by other television writers, most notably Alan Bennett and Matthew Graham, for a perceived lack of humility and self-criticism; Graham described him as having "come undone" after The Singing Detective and beginning to believe "every line that dripped from his pen was a work of genius". Bennett referred in his 1998 diaries to a television programme "that took Potter at his own self-evaluation (always high), when there was a good deal of indifferent stuff which was skated over". Private Eye once lampooned him as Dennis Plodder, due to the slow pace of some of his work, whilst also branding him as "the whingeing playwright".

Legacy[link]

Although Potter won few awards, he is held in high regard by many within the television and film industry, and he was an influence on such creators as Steven Bochco,^[23] Alan Ball^{[citation needed]}, Andrew Davies,^[24] Charlie Kaufman^{[citation needed]}, Peter Bowker,^[25] Margaret Edson^{[citation needed]} and Alain Resnais.^[26] His work has been the subject of many critical essays, books, websites and documentaries.

BBC Four marked the tenth anniversary of Potter's death in December 2004 with a major series of documentaries about his life and work, accompanied by showings of Pennies from Heaven and The Singing Detective, as well as several of his single plays — many of which had not been shown since their maiden broadcast.^[27] His influence has also extended into popular music: Welsh band Manic Street Preachers used quotes from Potter on the inner sleeves to their single "Kevin Carter" and greatest hits collection, while Scottish art rock band Franz Ferdinand modelled the promotional video for their song "The Dark of the Matinée" after Blue Remembered Hills and The Singing Detective. Guy Garvey, lead singer with Elbow, has said he named his band after the exchange in The Singing Detective where the central character claims that word to be the most beautiful in the English language.

Sources[link]

Footnotes

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Dennis Potter

• Dennis Potter official site
• The Singing Detective – Exploring Dennis Potter's Thematic Preoccupations British Film Resource
• 1986 and 1991 interviews with Dennis Potter BBC4 (Audio)
• Dennis Potter biography and credits at the British Film Institute's Screenonline
• An Interview with Dennis Potter at the British Film Institute's Screenonline
• Dennis Potter at the Internet Movie Database

John Zorn
Zorn performing in 2006
Background information
Also known as	Dekoboko Hajime, Rav Tzizit
Born	(1953-09-02) September 2, 1953 (age 58)
Origin	New York City, United States
Genres	Avant-garde, experimental[1]
Occupations	Composer, producer
Instruments	Saxophone, clarinet, flute, guitar, keyboards, double bass, drums, percussion
Years active	1973–present
Labels	Tzadik, Avant, DIW, Elektra Nonesuch, Earache, Hat Hut, Shimmy-Disc, Eva, Toy's Factory, Nato, Lumina, Black Saint, Subharmonic, Parachute, Yukon, Rift
Associated acts	Naked City, Masada, Painkiller, Hemophiliac, Weird Little Boy, Lou Reed, Laurie Anderson
Website	www.tzadik.com
Notable instruments
Clarinet, Piano, Theremin, Wind machine

John Zorn (born September 2, 1953 in New York City) is an American avant-garde composer, arranger, record producer, saxophonist and multi-instrumentalist. Zorn is a prolific artist: he has hundreds of album credits as performer, composer, or producer. He has had experience with a variety of genres including jazz, rock, hardcore punk, classical, extreme metal, klezmer, film, cartoon, popular, and improvised music.^[2] Zorn brings these styles to his work,^[2] which he refers to with the label avant-garde/experimental.^[1]

Zorn has stated: "All the various styles are organically connected to one another. I'm an additive person - the entire storehouse of my knowledge informs everything I do. People are so obsessed with the surface that they can't see the connections, but they are there."^[3]

Zorn has led the punk jazz band Naked City and the klezmer-influenced quartet Masada, composed Masada Songbooks (written concert music for classical ensembles), and has produced music for film and documentary.

Zorn established himself within the New York City downtown music movement in the mid 1970s and has since composed and performed with a wide range of musicians working in diverse musical areas. By the early 1990s Zorn was working extensively in Japan, attracted by that culture's openness about borrowing and remixing ingredients from elsewhere, before returning to New York as a permanent base in the mid-1990s.^[4][5][6] Zorn has undertaken many tours of Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, often performing at festivals with varying ensembles to display his diverse output.^[7][8]

After releasing albums on several independent US and European labels, Zorn signed with Elektra Nonesuch and attracted wide acclaim in 1985 when he released The Big Gundown, a cover of music composed by Ennio Morricone.^[9] He attracted further attention when worldwide by following this with the release of Spillane in 1987, and Naked City by Naked City in 1989.^{[1][10][11][12]} Zorn then recorded on the Japanese DIW label and curated the Avant subsidiary label before forming Tzadik in 1995, where he was prolific in issuing several new recordings each year as well as releasing the work of many other musicians.

Biography[link]

Early life[link]

John Zorn was born in New York City and learned piano, guitar and flute as a child.^[13] He grew up in a household full of a broad spectrum of sound: his mother listened to classical and world music, his father to jazz, French chansons, and country music, and his older brother to doo-wop, and 1950s rock and roll.^[14] Zorn recalled an episode of his life, after buying a record by Mauricio Kagel in 1968 at the age of fifteen, that influenced his subsequent taste for experimental and avant-garde music:^[15][16]

Here we are: Kagel, "Improvisation Ajoutée." I bought this when I was about 15. Still marked: got it at Sam Goody in September, for 98 cents. And it's a really crazy piece, with the guys screaming and hooting, something that attracted me. I was over at my friend's house, and he really liked the Rolling Stones. And I just got this record, and I put it on and he looked at me like...who the hell are you? Are you out of your mind? And his mother was there, and she was like [puts palm on cheek] my God, take this off... and right then and there, I decided: this was the music.

Zorn spent time in his teenage years listening to classical music, film music, and, "listening to The Doors and playing bass in a surf band."^[14] He taught himself about orchestration and counterpoint, by transcribing scores and using in his own compositions, a procedure of "plagiarizing, stealing, quoting, or whatever you can call it", of collage and transposition into his own world, that he has been using throughout his career.^[17] He also studied music under Leonardo Balada.^{[citation needed]}

Zorn picked up the saxophone after discovering Anthony Braxton's album For Alto (1969) while studying composition at Webster College (now Webster University) in St. Louis, Missouri, where he attended classes taught by Oliver Lake.^[18][19] While still at Webster, Zorn incorporated elements of free jazz, avant-garde and experimental music, film scores, performance art and the cartoon scores of Carl Stalling into his first recordings which were later released as First Recordings 1973 (1995).^[20]

Zorn dropped out of college. Following a stint on the West Coast, Zorn moved to Manhattan. There he gave concerts in his apartment and other small NY venues, playing saxophone and a variety of reeds, duck calls, tapes, and other instruments.^[21] He founded a performance art project called Theatre of Musical Optics, in 1975 and became a major participant in the fertile, avant-garde, downtown music scene as a composer, performer and producer of music that challenged the confines of any single musical genre.^[22] Zorn later used the term "Theatre of Musical Optics" for the publishing company of his compositions.

Early composition[link]

Zorn's early major compositions included several "game pieces" or "game theories", which he's described as "complex systems harnessing improvisers in flexible compositional formats,"^[23] and which "involved strict rules, role playing, prompters with flashcards, all in the name of melding structure and improvisation in a seamless fashion."^[1] Game pieces were often named after sports, and include Baseball (1976), Lacrosse (1976), Dominoes (1977), Curling (1977), Golf (1977), Hockey (1978), Cricket (1978), Fencing (1978), Pool (1979), and Archery (1979) which was recorded at Martin Bisi's studio. His most enduring "game piece" is Cobra (1984) which he first released on album in 1987 and in subsequent versions in 1992, 1994 and 2002, and has revisited in performance many times.^[24][25][26] Zorn addresses both his own history and the musical philosophy behind his early works in the book Talking Music by William Duckworth.^[27]

In 1981, Zorn was "blowing duck calls in buckets of water at fringe venues," which included 8BC, Roulette, Chandelier, and Zorn's own clubhouse, the Saint.^[1] Zorn's first solo saxophone (and duck call) recordings were originally released in two volumes as The Classic Guide to Strategy in 1983 and 1986 on the Lumina label. Zorn's early small group improvisations are documented on Locus Solus (1983) which featured Zorn with various combinations of other improvisers including Christian Marclay, Arto Lindsay, Wayne Horvitz, Ikue Mori, and Anton Fier. Ganryu Island featured a series of duets by Zorn with Satoh Michihiro on shamisen, which received limited release on the Yukon label in 1984. Zorn has subsequently released these recordings as CDs on Tzadik making them more widely available than the original vinyl pressings.

Breakthrough recordings[link]

Zorn's breakthrough recording was 1985's The Big Gundown: John Zorn Plays the Music of Ennio Morricone, where Zorn offered radical arrangements of the Roman composer's themes from movies including The Big Gundown (1966), Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), A Fistful of Dynamite (1971), and Once Upon a Time in America (1984). The Big Gundown was endorsed by Morricone, who is quoted as saying: "This is a record that has fresh, good and intelligent ideas. It is realization on a high level, a work done by a maestro with great science-fantasy and creativity... Many people have done versions of my pieces, but no one has done them like this".^[28] Zorn's versions of Morricone's compositions incorporated elements of traditional Japanese music, soul jazz, and other diverse musical genres. Zorn's fifteenth-anniversary re-release of the album featured additional explorations of Morricone's work.

He first released the composition "Godard", a tribute to French film-maker Jean-Luc Godard whose jump-cut technique inspired Zorn's compositional approach, on the French tribute album The Godard Fans: Godard Ca Vous Chante? in 1986.^[29] Zorn followed this with his second major-label release Spillane in 1987 composed of three different tribute compositions. The title track featured text by Arto Lindsay set to an array of sonic film noir references, "Two-Lane Highway", a blues-based form to highlight the guitar of Albert Collins and "Forbidden Fruit", Zorn's tribute to a Japanese film star, performed by the Kronos Quartet.^[29] Further exploration of film noir themes were recorded for radio plays and released by Zorn as The Bribe: variations and extensions on Spillane (1998).^[30] "Godard" and "Spillane" were re-released as a single CD, Godard/Spillane, on Tzadik in 1999.^[31]

These pieces are described by Zorn as "file-card compositions", a method of combining composition and improvisation in which Zorn would write down a description of what he wanted on file-cards and arrange them to form the piece.^[32] Zorn described the process in 2003: "I write in moments, in disparate sound blocks, so I find it convenient to store these events on filing cards so they can be sorted and ordered with minimum effort. Pacing is essential. If you move too fast, people tend to stop hearing the individual moments as complete in themselves and more as elements of a sort of cloud effect... I worked 10 to 12 hours a day for a week, just orchestrating these file cards. It was an intense process - one I don't want to go through again."^[3]

Zorn's "file-card" method of organizing sound blocks into an overall structure largely depended on the musicians he chose, the way they interpreted what was written on the file cards, and their relationship with Zorn. "I'm not going to sit in some ivory tower and pass my scores down to the players." said Zorn, "I have to be there with them, and that's why I started playing saxophone, so that I could meet musicians. I still feel that I have to earn a player's trust before they can play my music. At the end of the day, I want players to say: this was fun - it was a lot of fucking work, and it's one of the hardest things I've ever done, but it was worth the effort."^[3]

Jazz interpreter[link]

Beginning in 1986 Zorn participated in several projects focused on modern jazz composers which highlighted his saxophone style. These included Voodoo (1986) by The Sonny Clark Memorial Quartet, with Wayne Horvitz, Ray Drummond and Bobby Previte and Spy vs Spy (1989) featuring hardcore punk-informed interpretations of Ornette Coleman's music performed by Zorn and Tim Berne on saxophones, Mark Dresser on bass and Joey Baron and Michael Vatcher on drums.^[33] News for Lulu (1988) and More News for Lulu (1992) featured Zorn, Bill Frisell and George Lewis performing compositions by Kenny Dorham, Sonny Clark, Freddie Redd, and Hank Mobley. He performed on two recordings by organist Big John Patton - Blue Planet Man (1993) and Minor Swing (1995) and contributed to the Sax Legends series (later re-released as The Colossal Saxophone Sessions) in 1993 with a version of Wayne Shorter's composition "Devil's Island" alongside Lee Konitz, who Zorn has described as "one of my all-time heroes".^[34]

While Zorn is often considered a jazz musician his schema is considerably broader. He stated: "The term 'jazz', per se, is meaningless to me in a certain way. Musicians don’t think in terms of boxes. I know what jazz music is. I studied it. I love it. But when I sit down and make music, a lot of things come together. And sometimes it falls a little bit toward the classical side, sometimes it falls a little bit towards the jazz, sometimes it falls toward rock, sometimes it doesn’t fall anywhere, it's just floating in limbo. But no matter which way it falls, it's always a little bit of a freak. It doesn’t really belong anywhere. It's something unique, it's something different, it's something out of my heart. It's not connected with those traditions."^[1] "But the music is not jazz music, it’s not classical music, it’s not rock music. It’s a new kind of music... So I feel like that created a deep misunderstanding in what this music is. People started judging this new music with the standards of jazz, with the definitions of what jazz is and isn’t, because stories about it appeared in jazz magazines. And now I’ll do a gig at the Marciac Jazz Festival and I’ll get offstage and Wynton Marsalis will say, 'That’s not jazz.' And I’ll say, 'You’re right! But this is the only gig I’ve got, man. Give me another festival and I’ll play there.'"^[35]