‘Genuine invective is an almost lost art in our wild satirical age,’ Dennis Potter complained in New Society in 1966. Now, as the British Film Institute celebrates the life and work of ‘the writer who redefined TV drama’, Oberon Books, with perfect timing, offers this collection of Potter’s critical abuse in journalism and interviews at its most constructively eloquent.
The Art of Invective essentially complements Humphrey Carpenter’s magisterial biography and all those DVDs of the plays that can still galvanise what Potter called ‘the palace of varieties in the corner of the room’. He believed that television, with its vast, all-inclusive audience, was a potentially powerful means of promulgating true democracy.
Potter’s stingingly vitriolic invective was motivated mainly by his resentment of puritanical repression, social inequity and the unfairness, as he experienced it, of physical suffering. He was born in 1935 in the Forest of Dean, a rural coal-mining enclave on the western fringe of Gloucestershire.
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