Editing Dennis Potter (section)

===Works for the BBC in the 1980s===
Potter's career in the early 1980s was spent as a screenwriter for the cinema. He returned to the BBC for a co-production with [[20th Century Fox]], writing the scripts for a 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 problems with the skin disease [[psoriasis]], for Potter an often debilitating condition leading to hospital admission, as a means to merge the lead character's imagination with his perception of reality.

Following ''[[Christabel (1988 TV drama)|Christabel]]'' (1988), Potter's adaptation of the memoirs of [[Christabel Bielenberg]], his next TV serial, ''[[Blackeyes (TV series)|Blackeyes]]'' (1989) was a major disappointment in his career. A drama about a [[model (person)|fashion model]], it was reviewed as self-indulgent by some critics, and accused of contributing to the [[misogyny]] Potter claimed he intended to expose.<ref name="BFI">{{Cite web|last=Cook|first=John|publisher=BFI Screenonline|title=Potter, Dennis (1935–1994)|url=http://www.screenonline.org.uk/people/id/451441/}}</ref> The critical backlash against Potter following ''Blackeyes'' led to Potter being labelled 'Dirty Den' (after [[Den Watts]], the ''[[EastEnders]]'' character) by the British tabloid press,<ref name=":1">{{cite news|last=Lawson|first=Mark|url=https://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/obituary-dennis-potter-1421167.html|title=Obituary: Dennis Potter|newspaper=The Independent|date=8 June 1994}}</ref> and resulted in a period of reclusion from television. The serial was adapted into a [[Blackeyes|novel]] (see below),

In 1990, referring to a scene in ''The Singing Detective'', Mary Whitehouse claimed on BBC Radio that Potter had been influenced by witnessing his mother engaging in adulterous sex. Potter's mother won substantial damages from the BBC<ref>{{cite news|url=http://film.guardian.co.uk/features/featurepages/0,,1074044,00.html|title=Watching the detective|newspaper=The Guardian|first=Mark|last=Lawson|date=2003-10-31}}</ref> and ''[[The Listener (magazine)|The Listener]]''.<ref>John R. Cook ''Dennis Potter: A Life on Screen'', Manchester University Press, 1998, p.350, n.82</ref> Potter had at least at times actually been 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".<ref>''The Guardian'', 16 February 1973, quoted in W. Stephen Gilbert ''The Life and Work of Dennis Potter'', Woodstock, NY: The Overlook Press, 1998, p.145 (originally published as ''Fight and Kick and Bite: Life and Work of Dennis Potter'', London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1995)</ref> In 1979 in an interview for ''[[The South Bank Show]]'', he rejected "the chorus of abuse" suffered by Whitehouse because she accepted the "central moral importance of – to use the grandest word – art".<ref>Ben Thompson (ed) [https://books.google.com/books?id=-r7k88pWzYgC&pg=RA2-PT85 ''Ban This Filth!: Letters From the Mary Whitehouse Archive''], London: Faber, 2012, p.85. Melvyn Bragg's interview with Potter, along with an earlier ''South Bank Show'' item about a 1978 theatre production of (the then banned TV play) ''Brimstone and Treacle'', is included in the DVD set of the dramatist's work for London Weekend Television.</ref>