TV REVIEW : Celebrating the Life of ‘Singing Detective’ Writer

The black and shrouded set behind host Melvyn Bragg and his guest, television author Dennis Potter, looks like a TV studio after a long day’s use.

When “An Interview With Dennis Potter” was taped weeks before the writer’s death in early June from pancreatic and liver cancer, it was done with Potter’s courageous willingness to sit before hot studio lights and summarize his life in 65 minutes.

Every moment with Bragg--and Potter fills nearly every moment with effusive talk--quashes the notion of the coward Potter insists he has always been.

This auto-memorial, produced by Britain’s Channel 4, is itself a kind of Potter drama: The diseased or dying man, the flood of childhood memories, the bursts of passion, the sudden glimpses of mortality, the insistent holding on to life. The man who wrote one of TV’s few masterpieces, “The Singing Detective,” ends up, through Bragg, “writing” this penultimate work, which might be called “The Singing Television Writer.”

Potter drinks and smokes his way through the talk (briefly interrupted by his need to take swigs of pain-killing morphine), celebrating the fact of the “now-ness” of life and that he can enjoy every second as if it were his last. He even suggests that if he had the time and means, he would kill publisher/tycoon Rupert Murdoch, whom he blames for much of the decay in English journalism and politics.

Potter dreads the thought of being young and English and hungry to get into TV today; projects without a commercial hook don’t stand a chance, he says, sounding a lot like American dramatists confronting the U.S. television machine.

The underlying drama of watching this interview is realizing that Potter was racing to finish two TV dramas--his 39th and 40th--before his death. Able to write 10 pages a day by rising at 5 a.m. (early enough before his heavy doses of morphine took effect), Potter managed to complete both “Karaoke” (for the BBC) and the virtual reality and cryogenic-themed “Cold Lazarus” (for Channel 4).

“Lazarus,” about a man of Potter’s era thawed out 400 years in the future, may be his ultimate cheating of death. Nothing for this great TV ironist and visionary could be sweeter.

* “An Interview With Dennis Potter” airs 9 tonight on KCET Channel 28 (before the 10:15 p.m. broadcast of Potter’s “Pennies From Heaven”).