BOOKS : BIOGRAPHY : Knocks on the box

FIGHT & KICK & BITE: The Life and Work of Dennis Potter by W Stephen Gilbert, Hodder pounds 18.99

WHEN Dennis Potter died in June last year, it was reasonable to assume that the obituaries would be followed quite shortly by the biographies. W Stephen Gilbert's is the first to arrive, hurrying off the press to make up for the fact that it is not the "official" life: written without access to Potter's letters or papers (and in the face of some opposition from the Potter estate), it has been compiled from interviews with those who would agree to talk, and in compensation the author has had to draw on his own wide knowledge of the plays and of British television, to which Potter devoted his working life.

In all likelihood, the book that Gilbert has written is more interesting than the one he may have wanted to write: few people have revealed more about themselves in their fiction than Potter. Gilbert has relatively little to tell us about the reality behind Potter's recurrent images of childhood in the Forest of Dean, draws only a few tentative inferences about his sexuality, mentions his psoriasis only insofar as it affected his ability to work, and leaves Potter's domestic life to the imagination. Margaret, Potter's wife for over 35 years, has eight references in the index (the same number as, for example, Grace Wyndham Goldie). The Potter we meet here is the working writer, in an environment that he made peculiarly his own.

He became the best-known among British television dramatists, partly because of his mastery of the television play and his daring innovations, partly because of his often-stated faith in television and his loyalty to it, and partly because of his unusual ability to attract attention. He was already something of a celebrity by the time he came down from Oxford, having been an editor of Isis, president of the Union, a contributor to the New Statesman and the subject of an article in Reynold's News about his alleged difficulty in dealing with his working-class background: "Miner's Son at Oxford Felt Ashamed of Home". This did not go down well at Home. The report was based on a leaked television interview for a programme on "Class in Private Life". Claiming that his views had been misrepresented, Potter issued a writ. It was his first brush with the popular press.

There was an ambivalence in Potter's attitude to publicity, just as in his attitude to class: to some extent, he needed to cling to an image of a Britain which (even in the Fifties when he set Lipstick on Your Collar) was subject to rigid social divisions, in a way that contradicted his own experience. Gilbert's account of Potter at Oxford shows him fitting in well beside the usual Old Etonians and Wyckhamists, as well as contemporaries like Kenith Trodd, whose father used to drive a crane. Potter didn't mind dramatising the extent of the journey he had made from the miner's cottage in the Forest of Dean, provided it was not vulgarised by headlines in Reynold's News.

Far worse was to come as he began to explore his other persistent theme, that of sexual disgust and frustration. The television "golden age" was also a time of conflict between a new breed of media people, keen to extend the boundaries of the medium, and conservatives who feared its popular impact. Between the two were the television executives, eager to please, but anxious not to offend.

In 1966, Potter was commissioned to write a modern version of a fairy story, Almost Cinderella, to which he gave a typically Potterian spin, including a scene set in a graveyard between Prince Charming and a prostitute. "Grave doubts" were expressed about its "suitability"; the filming was shelved. The story got into the press, Mrs Whitehouse congratulated the Corporation on its decision and Potter gave interviews to all the daily papers. There were questions in the House. The image that Potter was being invited to adopt, as a consequence of this and later scandals, was that of the artist struggling for creative freedom, but the reality was more complex. For one thing, though he was to hear from Mrs Whitehouse again, he seems to have held her in some respect: he felt that she did represent the views of "ordinary people", scorned by the "sophisticated metropolitan minority". Potter was himself a Puritan, and the nature of the sexual hang-ups that he explores in his work makes them incompatible with the sort of casual attitude to sex that would happily allow such things to be shown on television. He needed to shock, while at the same time defending his right to do so with impunity.

The enemy, for Potter, was not Mrs Whitehouse. The account here of his working life tells the story of the changes in British television, from the era of the black-and-white single play, when there were two rival channels, to the time when Potter, in his final interview, revealed that he had named his fatal cancer after Rupert Murdoch and expressed his despair at the present state of the art. Gilbert agrees with Potter that, when the television play flourished, our broadcasting was "a glory in British life".

The biographer has done an impressive amount of research, not only into Potter's television plays, but also his novels and journalism, including the book reviews which provided him with pin money when his illness was bad. At times the material is brought together in a slapdash manner, especially towards the end, where large extracts from interviews with Gina Bellman, Kenith Trodd and others are quoted verbatim; and the high points do not always stand out. One does, however: when Arthur first breaks into song in Pennies From Heaven, Gilbert remarks, we reach "a true turning-point: television will never be the same again". Moments like these were the justification of Potter's claims for his work and his chosen medium.