Showcasing a TV Dramatist’s Works of Art

Yes, television is getting you down. Your head aches, your eyes sting, your nose runs, your stomach burns, your limbs stiffen, your brain atrophies.

How do you spell relief?

D-E-N-N-I-S P-O-T-T-E-R.

Known mainly in this nation--but only barely--for “The Singing Detective,” his celebrated BBC miniseries about the memory wanderings of a writer immobilized by extreme psoriasis, Potter is arguably British television’s most important dramatist, a bold, provocative, controversial, challenging auteur whose works span nearly three decades.

Partly because of his uniqueness and partly because the single-play format has survived and flourished in British television much longer than here, there is no figure in U.S. television even remotely akin to Potter in terms of dramatic output and influence. Potter is a human laboratory for percolating ideas. Like any risk-taker, he sometimes fails, but better to tumble from a high wire than safely wallow in formulaic goo.

Himself afflicted with a debilitating condition known as psoriatic arthritis, Potter has written scores of original and adapted works for television and film. And 19 of the TV originals--including Potter’s memorable “The Singing Detective” and his even more rewarding “Pennies From Heaven”--soon will be shown in Los Angeles thanks to a traveling exhibition brought here by New York’s Museum of Television & Radio.

A slimmed-down version of a Potter retrospective presented in New York, this one runs Wednesday through Nov. 8 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, under the sponsorship of the Playboy Entertainment Group in association with the Playboy Foundation.

It has the makings of a golden occasion.

Although his tone is British, Potter finds new, exhilarating, often bizarre ways to express universal themes, making this exhibition an adventure into the realm of the possible, a rare opportunity for those weary of television’s realm of the predictable to sample what the medium can be.

What it hasn’t been in the United States is a red carpet for Potter.

“The Singing Detective” and “Pennies From Heaven” have surfaced on a few public-TV stations (including KCET-TV Channel 28), as did another Potter program in the exhibition, “Cream in My Coffee.” Except for two of his adaptations, however, the PBS network has snubbed Potter. His dramatizations of Thomas Hardy’s “The Mayor of Casterbridge” and the autobiographical “Christabel” made the “Masterpiece Theatre” lineup, but in more than two decades on the air, that esteemed but conservative PBS series has never extended its Anglophilia to Potter’s more audacious original works.

Having described U.S. television as “handed over lock, stock and shampoo-sachet to the hucksters,” Potter is said to be equally tough on the BBC. In fact, two of his works in this retrospective--”Vote, Vote, Vote for Nigel Barton” and “Brimstone and Treacle”--were deemed so controversial by the BBC that they were initially withheld from broadcast, the latter for 11 years.

“Brimstone and Treacle” is a very strange--but on occasion comic--production that expresses and satirizes religious themes through a demonic young man’s repeated rape of a helpless girl who was turned into a vegetable as a result of being hit by a car. The BBC initially banned it on grounds of “taste.”

“Vote, Vote, Vote for Nigel Barton,” on the other hand, draws on Potter’s own experience as an unsuccessful candidate for Parliament in 1964. Its satirical condemnation of politics as usual freaked out the BBC, which withheld it from broadcast for six months.

Although produced nearly 28 years ago, this wickedly funny story about an idealistic young candidate--whose “blasted conscience” maddens his Machiavellian campaign manager--is as applicable today as then. Although Nigel soon gets the hang of things, using such empty babble as “the crucial nature of the vital choice” to con voters, his higher self ultimately dictates his withdrawal from the race.

It’s Nigel’s wife who delivers the most damning speech: “For once, I’d like to see a politician that didn’t become a dishonest slob the moment he stepped off the platform.” Thus do some of Potter’s characters of the past articulate the cynicism of the present.

Like “The Singing Detective” and other Potter works, music is integral to “Pennies From Heaven,” a refreshingly dynamic miniseries that mingles dark twists with bursts of optimism expressed through song. Made into a less effective theatrical movie with Steve Martin, the Depression-era story about a down-on-his-luck sheet music salesman belts out another of Potter’s universal themes--human resilience.

In “The Traitor,” a Potter story about a Kim Philby-like British intelligence chief who defects to the Soviet Union, where he reveals his inner torment and ideological emptiness in a drunken crackup, the pathetic lead character delivers a short speech that, in a much different way, could apply to Potter himself: “I am what I am, and I did what I did. . . .”

What Potter did, and does, is come at things from odd angles, often overlapping realities and fantasies to create an imagination-widening theater of the mind. You see it in “Blackeyes,” an austere, largely unsatisfying 1989 miniseries--the first project Potter directed as well as wrote--that weaves a complex web of competing truths about a lewd old man’s “sexy bestseller” that distorts his niece’s modeling career.

Potter is at times equally mazy but infinitely more successful in “The Singing Detective,” whose bed-ridden protagonist’s story moves forward largely within the contours of his own mind. That character, a cheap mystery novelist named Philip Marlow, speaks words that again epitomize Potter: “All clues. No solutions. That’s the way things are.”

What a contrast to U.S. television, where tidy endings are mandated, viewers are rarely challenged and stories depicting the enigmas of real life are usually regarded as heresy.

In an expression of respect for his audience, Potter is demanding, requiring viewers to labor along with him and tough it out, rarely delivering everything to them on a platter. If only his work were a metaphor for more of television.

Not always successful, but never less than interesting.