The Final Cut
The Final Cut is a bold and insightful podcast exploring the latest in film and television. Hosted by Professor John Cook and filmmaker Charlotte Bjuren, each episode dives into new releases, classic gems, and the stories shaping screen culture today.
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The Final Cut
DENNIS POTTER 'Lost' Interview RESTORED After 35 Years!
Dennis Potter Like You’ve Never Heard Him Before — Restored, Revealing & Remarkable 🎙️
To mark what would have been the 90th birthday of the legendary screenwriter and author Dennis Potter (The Singing Detective, Pennies from Heaven), an audio extract from a rare 1990 interview is being released, having been restored to near studio quality for the first time in 35 years.
🎧 Originally recorded on cassette tape and almost unlistenable due to poor sound quality, this restored powerful 6-minute clip captures Potter in full reflective mode—deeply personal and poetic; talking eloquently about his life, work, and legacy in a way that almost feels like his ultimate artistic statement.
🕰️ Recorded when Potter was still at the peak of his powers—four years before his untimely death—this conversation was part of the first ever British PhD on his work, and offers rare and essential insight into one of television’s greatest minds.
The restored interview is preceded by a 3 minute introduction by the interviewer, Prof. John Cook (now Emeritus Professor of Media, Glasgow Caledonian University, Scotland) who sets the scene, explaining the context of the original recording and of how Potter's voice has been brought back to life with the help of modern digital tools.
🔥 Whether you're a longtime fan or discovering Dennis Potter for the first time, this is a must-watch moment in British cultural history.
👇 If you enjoy this clip, please like, comment, and subscribe—there may be more unreleased gems to come…
📬 For questions, comments, or media enquiries, feel free to contact Professor John Cook via messaging on LinkedIn
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17th of May 2025 marks the 90th anniversary of the birth of the legendary screenwriter, playwright and author Dennis Potter, author of the famous TV serials Pennies from Heaven and the Singing Detective, which is widely acclaimed to be his masterpiece, amongst many other TV plays, tv serials and movies, in 1994, potter was sadly diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and died in June of that year at the age of 59. Four years earlier, however, I had actually met and interviewed him when, as a young 20-something student, I researched and wrote the first British PhD on Potter's work. Results of that research would be published a year after Potter's death as the book Dennis Potter A Life on Screen. So May 2025 marks not only the 90th anniversary of Dennis Potter's birth, but also, coincidentally, 35 years since I interviewed Potter, an interview which took place on 10th May 1990 at his literary agent's office in London, and it lasted two and a half hours, as Potter ranged with me over his entire career, talking fluently, with an eloquence that sometimes bordered on poetry. Short quotes from the interview were subsequently used by me for my book Dennis Potter A Life on Screen, but the original interview was recorded on old C90 audio cassette tapes using a tiny little dictaphone, which was, I'm afraid, the best I could afford at that time as a poor student. So this means these recordings have never really been circulated in any high-quality listenable format. So in order to mark Potter's 90th birthday, as well as that 35th anniversary of my own interview, I thought it might be fitting to dig out the original audio cassette tapes and to try to digitise them, using all the amazing modern digital tools we now have at our disposal to clean up the old recordings, remove the terrible background hiss and tape noise which had plagued the original analogue versions, and rendering them into something approximating near studio quality. It's now possible to, using these tools, to bring back Dennis Potter's voice much more clearly, so almost it's as if he's there in the room with you as you listen to him.
Speaker 1:Now, this is a sort of experiment on my part.
Speaker 1:I've selected a key five to six minute extract, and it is an experiment, and if you're interested and like what's been done, please like, comment or subscribe to this YouTube channel, since there may well be opportunities to release more extended parts from the interview at a later date, but for now I've chosen a five to six minute extract.
Speaker 1:That came at the very end of my two and a half hour interview with Potter in which, in his own way, he tried to provide a final statement and summation on what he thought he had been doing his whole life and career, and that's why I thought it would be fitting to extract that to Mark Potter's 90th birthday. The tapes have been subject to only the lightest of edits in the transfer over to digital audio quality. Only occasionally have I made snips where I felt it would be too much to explain the wider context in an introduction such as this. So essentially, what you're about to hear is what I heard in that room with Dennis Potter all those 35 years ago and revealed for the first time in 35 years to the same auditory quality as what I originally heard. I hope you enjoy listening to it, find it interesting, even inspiring, and happy 90th birthday, dennis Potter.
Speaker 2:I think we've reached the end of this.
Speaker 2:I'm not going to say anything apart from the objective facts. I'm not going to say anything about my own personal struggles with my own nature, except this that at the end of the day I have tried through a long route and through my own cow, calvaries or whatever, I remain somehow or other, against all the odds, a Christian. It's what I actually, in the end, believe, even though intellectually I am appalled by the very boldness of such a statement. I know that at root somewhere, somehow, that is what I turn and respond. That is what tortures or torments and whatever travails mental or physical or social or sexual or whatever that I go through, I end up somehow or as a getting my lack into order, and that the getting my life, my work, improves or broadens or widens, the more surely I tame myself. I put it all on this as a page, which is partly why, also, I was reclusive in um, um, whatever struggles, struggles and whatever mishaps or whatever happened to me as a child or whatever central events, I mean sexually assaulted when I was 10 years of age. Well, that is true, I was.
Speaker 2:People endure what they endure and they deal with death. It may corrupt them, it may lead them into all sorts of compensatory excesses in order to escape the nightmare and memory of that. But that is not, that isn't a put note, it is a side note, not a footnote. It's important but it's not that important and you're left with your basic human strivings and dignity and talents. And the odd thing about which will explain some arrogances but will also explain some humilities some arrogances, but will also explain some humilities is that I, I've been aware from, I should say, the age of six or that I had talent, um, and because I was brought up in that certain way and by decent people, in a, uh, an environment that had implied certain standards, whether it was through the chapel or through the home or whatever. The parable of the buried talents has always been the one that I first responded to and I just I would expect somebody who was musical or somebody who played football or somebody who could dance football or somebody who could dance too, that it was an obligation upon me to do that. It was an obligation on the footballer not to get bunk on the Friday night, for example, and to train, an obligation on the dance, you know all of those. Similarly, an obligation upon me, and certainly to use like an instrument some of the details of my own life, um, um, but without that, not you know which is, maybe it'd be.
Speaker 2:It's one of the forms of sickness to have such a such a delusion if one didn't have the talent, this certainness of me. And it would have been a tragedy unbearably, unbearably large in its dimensions if I had had to. Because I felt and I knew, even when I was, you know, looking at the banner in the chapel or whatever, I knew that I had to not obey in the sense that, hey, come here, my son. I just felt that imperative upon me and the early life was about how to express that. But all the time it never stopped right, and maybe illness was a gift in that sense, in that it just rammed home to me not only is there no choice, but there literally is no choice.
Speaker 2:If you want to earn your bread, that's what you've got to do. And that's what explains when I say you know there is a canon, you know, canon was the word I think he used is that knowing that means that you can make connections and that you are determined to make connections and that you want the whole work to proceed so it can be seen at the end in the same. You know, in some of those words and symbols from that childhood book, continually be proud and proud of my personality, and that can lead to great misunderstanding of people seeing this or that aspect of your life. I do think I was very shy and restored and because somebody can get very arrogant and bullying and blasphemy, they're looking, you see, from just one angle at one what is a self-same journey. But the fact that I see it in terms of a journey is obviously due to my childhood images. It is also the fact that I was given talent and if you are given it, it is your obligation to use it.
