Dennis Potter; Screenwriter for British TV

Dennis Potter, screenwriter for the acclaimed British TV series “The Singing Detective” and “Pennies From Heaven,” died Tuesday at age 59.

Potter died of liver and pancreatic cancer at his home in Ross-on-Wye, 100 miles west of London.

He had suffered more than 30 years from a painful form of arthritis called psoriatic arthropathy, which makes the skin blister and joints swell. The disease, which he called his “strange, shadowy ally,” was responsible for turning him away from journalism and politics to television writing.

“Not many people have had the chance to address themselves in prolonged crises in the way I have,” he told The Times in 1988. “That’s what the illness has given me. I gave up all my public aspirations--journalism and politics, my original careers. Everything I thought about myself had to be re-examined.

“If you turn a very hard eye inward and really look, then it is creative. You have to remake what you thought you were, and what you make is better. It was like an enforced lesson in what it’s like to be a human being.”

The illness influenced his best-known and most acclaimed work, the six-part series “The Singing Detective” in 1986. The story unfolds in the mind of the central character--played by Michael Gambon--who suffers the same illness and lies in a hospital bed contemplating himself and the world with disgust. He hallucinates about characters from his past.

Potter used the romantic and popular music of the 1940s, lip-synced by his characters, as a startling counterpoint to his bleak vision.

When it was shown in the United States, New York Times film critic Vincent Canby said Potter “single-handedly restored the reputation of the screenwriter, at least in television.”

Old music in lip-sync was a device that Potter first used with the tunes of the ‘30s in “Pennies From Heaven,” a similarly dark tale made as a TV series in 1978 but later compressed for a Hollywood film starring Steve Martin.

Potter earned an Academy Award nomination for the screenplay, although the film did poorly at the box office. “I built up record-breaking losses for MGM,” he later joked.

He used the device again with “Lipstick on Your Collar” in 1993, with the music of the 1950s, calling it the third part of a trilogy.

In “Dreamchild,” a movie about the real little girl who was Lewis Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland,” he also merged fantasy and reality.

He said he was pleased when the archbishop of York defended “The Singing Detective” as a “classically Christian drama” after much press criticism of shocking scenes.

Potter was almost always controversial. The BBC did not broadcast “Brimstone and Treacle” until 1987, 11 years after it was made, because of a scene in which a handicapped girl was raped by the devil.

“Blackeyes,” which Potter intended as a condemnation of the pornography industry, was criticized as misogynist and voyeuristic when it was broadcast in 1989.

One of Potter’s most innovative plays was 1979’s “Blue Remembered Hills,” about the cruelty of children, in which children were played by adults.

Potter’s childhood was spent in the Forest of Dean, in western England, where his father was a coal miner. Potter won a place at Oxford, where he was editor of the university magazine and became interested in politics.

He lost a bid for a seat in Parliament in 1964, the year his illness began.

His wife, Margaret, died from cancer last month. He is survived by a son, Robert, and two daughters, Jane and Sarah.

In the last months of his life, Potter gave a television interview in which he spoke of his latest projects and impending death.

“I was a coward when I was young,” he said. “It’s nice to know that at the end, I’m not.”