1With their prominent use of local dialect and working-class milieu, Dennis Potter’s television plays were part of a radical movement in British broadcasting that gave voice to regional identities. Brought up in a working-class mining community in the Forest of Dean, Gloucestershire, the television dramatist was both an exemplar of post-war social mobility and a proponent of local specificity, returning to his home region in plays and serials throughout his 30-year career. Despite drawing on authentic regional experiences, however, Potter is best known for undermining the naturalistic conventions that dominated television drama at the beginning of the 1960s, notably by breaking the fourth-wall, for overt self-reflexivity and surreal fantasy sequences. Blue Remembered Hills (1979), his final work for the BBC’s drama strand Play for Today, stands out for being one of his few works set entirely in the Forest of Dean and its extensive use of regional dialect. Yet it is also notable for having adults play its cast of children. We will ask to what extent this conceit undermines the illusion of the play in the light of contemporaneous debates about naturalism in television drama. On one hand, the play’s regionalism can be seen as a marker of authenticity, acting as a corrective to lazy stereotypes about West Country rusticity. On the other, the physical exaggeration of the performances can be viewed in the context of Mikhail Bakhtin’s ‘grotesque realism’, an irreverent mode celebrating excess and caricature. We argue that the play can be seen as embracing two seemingly antithetical modes—the kitchen sink, on one hand, and something self-consciously illusory on the other—and ask what effects this unusual fusion produces.
2In television drama, it was often the writer who enjoyed the auteur status, rather than the director, even when—like Dennis Potter—the dramatist had no established experience in theatre. Yet in its early days, the standalone television play, as its name suggested, had more in common with theatre, a legacy of broadcast drama’s origins on the radio, a medium restricted to sound. These restrictions established ‘different hierarchies between speech and image’ to those of cinema, conferring particular ‘respect for the spoken word’ (Caughie 100).
3As it moved out of the physical restrictions of studio recording, however, the ‘play’ became increasingly cinematic, and the term increasingly anachronistic. By the 1980s, many of its practitioners—notably Mike Leigh and Ken Loach—were producing feature-length, cinematic productions, while others like Dennis Potter became best known for television serials of four to six episodes. One of these, the BBC miniseries Blackeyes in 1989, Potter directed himself, but he rarely stepped behind the camera. Much of his best-known work, like the serials The Singing Detective (1986) and Pennies from Heaven (1978), as well as the play Blue Remembered Hills, were directed by others (Jon Amiel, Piers Haggart and Brian Gibson, respectively). All of these and many other Potter plays and serials were, however, produced by lifelong friend and collaborator Kenith Trodd.
4Dennis Potter’s auteur status was cemented with his work on BBC drama strands such as The Wednesday Play (1964–70) and Play for Today (1970–84), which were a dedicated space for exploring difficult subject matter and stories of an experimental nature. John Caughie traces this trend back to the government-commissioned Pilkington Committee Report of 1962, which ‘gave licence to writers, script editors, producers, and directors to be controversial’, enshrining in ‘television drama notions associated with . . . art which is provocative’ (Caughie 128). 1962 was also the year that Canadian Sydney Newman became Head of TV Drama at the BBC, initiating The Wednesday Play strand the following year. He built on the success he had enjoyed at ABC, then the franchise holder for the ITV network in the North of England, which had commissioned writers, many from the North, for its ground-breaking drama strand Armchair Theatre. Newman had overseen an overhaul of the anthology format by ‘reducing the number of adaptations and commissioning more original, contemporary drama, especially plays with regional subject matter’ (Cooke 29), including work by writers such as Clive Exton, Alun Owen, Harold Pinter and Ray Rigby.
5Like Armchair Theatre, The Wednesday Play tapped into the spirit of the so-called ‘Angry Young Men’ of the late 1950s, and their brand of ‘gritty . . . working-class realism’ (Caughie 95), often referred to as a kitchen sink aesthetic. The period had witnessed a ‘social revolution’ in which British ‘cultural life was dominated by provincial writers’ and ‘an audience eager for theatre of working-class background played with regional dialogue’ (Kennedy Martin 22). Sydney Newman is thus credited with having ‘brought television drama into line with contemporary developments’ not only in theatre but also literature and cinema, and for having laid the foundations ‘for subsequent developments in television drama . . . featuring regional characters with distinct regional accents’ (Cooke 29).
6Despite their ‘regional subject matter’, Armchair Theatre’s plays were intended not only for ‘the Northern and Midlands audiences which ABC primarily served’ but also ‘a national audience, courtesy of the ITV network’ (Cooke 30). Indeed, competition from that network, which had been launched—with its regional franchise system—in 1956, ‘caused the BBC to rethink its own regional broadcasting policy’ (30). Long considered too London-centric, the BBC would eventually build the Pebble Mill studios in 1971 in Birmingham as a home to its English Regions Drama department, with a remit to produce ‘regional television drama for the network . . . from all parts of the country’ (36). The proliferation of regional drama from the end of the 1950s can thus be seen not only in the context of (in more recent parlance) levelling-up but rather competition between the BBC and ITV, both of which were responding to popular demand.
7Despite its marked regionality, Blue Remembered Hills was not produced by the English Regions Drama department itself. Yet, like many of the Angry Young Men, Dennis Potter and producer Kenith Trodd were provincial grammar school boys who had been ‘uprooted from their class’ (Caughie 85) and educated at Oxbridge Universities alongside the elite. Determined to make a new television drama that ‘rooted itself in a particular experience of class from the inside’, Potter—like many of his contemporaries—chose as a theme ‘the dislocations of class mobility’ (85). Although his writing was never associated with the kitchen sink realism of his peers, it is important to understand how his background gave him an advantageous platform at the time. As John Cook explains, ‘flaunting your working-class credentials and your angriness was thus a valuable means of getting noticed’ (Cook 11).
8Even if Potter was for a time a journalist and briefly a Labour MP candidate, his politics were certainly not radical. Instead, his radicalism was aimed at breaking down the conventions of television drama by experimenting with illusion-breaking metatextuality. Yet he would return to his working-class upbringing, and the Forest of Dean mining community in particular, throughout his work, creating a strange tension between seemingly authentic representations of regional identity and deliberate reminders of the constructed nature of what we see. Indeed, Potter was one of the first and most famous British television dramatists to respond to screenwriter Troy Kennedy Martin’s infamous essay ‘Nats Go Home’ in 1964, which railed against the influence of theatre on television drama, and especially the representation of characters’ ‘psychological motivation’ (Kennedy Martin 21) by ‘means of dialogue’ (23) alone. Despite the pronounced regionalism of much of Potter’s work, it sought to free the television play from its emphasis on the spoken word and, through the use of shifting timeframes, ‘the naturalist tyranny of [linear] time’ (31).
9Blue Remembered Hills tells the story of seven children on a summer’s day in 1943, who meet in woodland in the Forest of Dean. All played by adults, they are shown bullying a member of their party, Donald (Colin Jeavons), whom the others mockingly nickname Donald Duck. A victim of domestic abuse, Donald is also traumatised by the apparent disappearance of his father on the front. Instead of offering their sympathy, the others ultimately turn on him and trap him in a burning barn, pretending to be an Italian prisoner of war, rumoured to have escaped from a military installation in the area.
10The Forest of Dean itself would not seem to subscribe to the North-South divide which characterises the British self-image. It is not a region associated with the kitchen sink realism of the British New Wave in cinema of the late 1950s and early 1960s, notably adaptations of plays and novels by Angry Young Men such as John Osborne and Alan Sillitoe (often set in the East Midlands), of Alan Bleasdale for Liverpool, or of Ken Loach for South Yorkshire. When Potter was starting out in television, however, the Forest of Dean was both economically depressed and ‘one of the most remote inward-looking districts of England’ (Cook 8).
- 1 Although the filmed version contains some very minor differences, I have deferred to the script whe (...)
11In Blue Remembered Hills, the Forest’s isolation actually enables the children’s cruelty, not unlike in Lord of the Flies. As in William Golding’s novel, it is a rather pessimistic vision of human nature, and very much analogous to the failings of the adult world from which the children seem initially liberated. As in Golding’s novel, the children imagine the stalking presence of a beast-like figure. Yet finally, the menace ‘is shown not to be outside in the forest but within all of the children’, who ‘become what they fear most: the “bogeyman” Italian’ (Cook 115). While in Lord of the Flies, the phantom beast is more a projection of the boys’ fear in an unfamiliar environment, in Potter’s play, it is about the incursion of a foreign element—referred to by the children variously as ‘bloody Ities’ or ‘wops’ (Potter 1984, 75)1—into their isolated world.
12Like parts of the industrial North, the Forest of Dean’s economy was associated with mining, a background feature of several Potter plays. Yet, the West Country has long been ‘stereotyped as rustic’ in the public imagination, ‘associated with “yokels” leaning on gates and sucking straws’ (Ellis 1112). The modes of speech of the West Country have been mimicked to represent the dialect of a ‘country-bumpkin’ (McArthur 297), first on stage and later in literature and television. ‘Mummerset’ is a name that has been given to the ‘imitation rustic West Country accent used by actors, from the name of an imaginary or idealised rustic county in the West of England (‘Mummerset’, accessed online).’ The enduring myth of the region’s rustic charms tallies with Raymond Williams’ analysis of how representations of the countryside have historically coalesced around notions of a ‘natural way of life: of peace, innocence and simple virtue’, on one hand, and ‘backwardness, ignorance, limitation’ (Williams 9) on the other.
13The Forest of Dean dialect shares with that of the wider Gloucestershire and other western counties a number of characteristics in terms of its accent, grammar and lexical particularities. Yet it is also considered to have its own distinct qualities. In those Dennis Potter plays and serials with scenes in the Forest of Dean, the dramatist makes use of local modes of speech in a way that is analogous to the ‘popularisation of Northern culture and identity in the late 1950s and early 1960s’, before which ‘British television has been notable for its lack of regional . . . accents and dialect’, that are ‘the most obvious and immediate signifiers of regional identity and regional difference’ (Cooke 17). The question of local specificity and authenticity is a more complex one than it initially seems. Is it, asks Lez Cooke, ‘determined by the ostensible setting of a drama, even if it is actually filmed in a different region altogether’, or by ‘authorial . . . regional subject matter, characters, or linguistic specificity’? (Cooke 100). Blue Remembered Hills certainly fulfils most of these criteria, although it was actually filmed on location in Dorset. The woodland setting, as we will see, is important in the play but is in itself not marked by characteristics enabling viewers to pinpoint its exact location. Nor is the name of the region, or any of its towns or villages, mentioned in the play. The play’s regional specificity is, instead, identified through its modes of speech and through the identity of its writer.
14The most striking aspects of the dialect are the use of archaic pronouns such as ‘thee’ and ‘thou’, second-person object and subject pronouns respectively. Modern first- and third-person subject and object pronouns are also inverted, so you have phrases such as ‘him showed I’, instead of ‘he showed me’. The West Country dialects are said to have their origins in West Saxon speech, which spread into what are today’s western counties, with the Anglo-Saxon expansion of the Kingdom of Wessex in the early Middle Ages. Aspects of the western dialects therefore have a clear Germanic inflection. In Blue Remembered Hills, the characters say ‘I be’ and ‘he be’ instead of ‘I am’ or ‘he is’, even in the present continuous. Rather than a debasement of English, this derives from Old English and thus the Low German ik bün. Similarly, ‘Bist’ is often used as the second person form of ‘be’, also descending directly from German. Questions that in standard English would begin ‘Are you . . .’ are formulated as ‘Bist thou’. The rhotic pronunciation of English in the West Country is likewise ‘considered a survival of the /r/ of Old English’, with a distinctive ‘burr’ that ‘contrasts strongly’ (Ellis 1112) with received pronunciation.
15Many of these linguistic elements are evident from the opening scenes of Blue Remembered Hills, in which the ‘children’ make frequent reference to the second world war, which is unfolding in the background. Here we find Willie (Colin Welland) and Peter (Michael Elphick) boasting of the kinds of military men they would like to become:
peter: I be going to be a parachuter, see
willie: I be going to be a commando
peter: Give us a bit of thik apple, Willie (Potter 1984, 43)
16‘Thik’ here denotes ‘that’, and a dispute quickly escalates between the two boys over an apple that Willie is eating, and that Peter would like to share. Willie tries to stall his friend by pretending that it is a cooking apple, and bitter to taste (‘Him’s a cooker, mind. . . . And him yunt half sour. Honest’). ‘Yunt’, often written in the published script as ‘byunt’ and ‘bent’, transcribed alternately in the Oxford Companion to English as ‘baint’ (Ellis 1112), is the negative form of the verb to be. ‘Bist thou going to give I a bit or not?’ (Potter 1984, 43), Peter persists, before forcibly taking it by pinning Willie to the floor and spitting in his face. Shortly after their quarrel, Willie tells Peter a story of RAF pilots dropping poisoned apples over Germany. Yet, despite the Biblical connotations, the play does not stage a fall from innocence. Casual bullying and threats are a routine part of their interactions, and Blue Remembered Hills is partly ‘about the line that children walk between play and persecution’ (Diski accessed n.p.).
17The Forest dialect’s roots in Anglo-Saxon are also suggestive of an isolated region that was in some ways less affected by modernity, a reminder of ‘the past and its stranglehold on the present’, an ‘ever-present tic in Britain’s psyche’ (Young 105). The thees and thous recall, in the popular imagination, Shakespeare and the ‘King James Bible’ (Cook 8), yet are adopted here in a dialect that would be considered by many to be non-standard English. It is also strange to hear ‘children’ using pronouns associated with a high register of English among much broader language such as ‘bugger’ and ‘bloody’, as well as joking about urinating and defecating. ‘Thow bist talking a lot of squit, Willie’, declares Peter at one point, while John (Robin Ellis) complains about the squeaking noise made by the girls’ perambulator in terms that seem at once sacred and profane: ‘Hark at thik bloody pram’ (Potter 1984, 60; emphases added).
18Dennis Potter was not the first writer to promote Forest dialect through his work. Local poet F.W. Harvey, whose writing first became successful during the First World War, was bolstered by readings on the wireless that became ‘significant in popularising the idea of a distinctive Forest’ culture (Griffiths 127). Potter, however, was perhaps the first and certainly the most famous to do so in television broadcasting. In his non-fiction book The Changing Forest, Potter had expressed concern that the language and customs of the Forest were under attack from the centralising forces of consumerism and social mobility. Fearing that the dialect would be ‘hammered flat’ (Potter 1962, 133) by modernity, he complained about how the ‘jingle-jangle phrases of current advertising keep slipping into popular speech’ (69).
19Potter’s work can also be seen to react to the diminishing of Forest dialect in different ways. A signature trope of Dennis Potter’s later serials is having characters suddenly launch into lip-synched song and dance routines, notably the six-part Pennies from Heaven, which was broadcast the year before Blue Remembered Hills. There is a sense that Potter’s characters can only express themselves emotionally through popular music because they are losing connection with authentic modes of speech. As infectious as these musical interludes could be, there was an underlying critique of the ‘influence of mass culture in general on the lives and minds of its characters’ (Creeber 503). At the other extreme, Blue Remembered Hills plunges the audience into scenes of Forest life spoken entirely in the local vernacular, which gives the play the character of being both rooted in a recognisably English culture and alien. While regional dialect and setting is typically seen as a ‘guarantee for verisimilitude’ (Cooke 127), the play has, as we will see, its own notions of role-playing and ventriloquy.
- 2 According to the website of the Forest Dialect Project, ‘very few speakers of the dialect remain’. (...)
20Nevertheless, the representation of authentic local speech in Potter’s plays and serials can still be viewed as an act of preservation, or even vulgarisation, of regional identity. Incidentally, very few people apparently speak the dialect at all today.2 The ‘loss of localised features in urban and rural varieties’ of a given language is referred to as ‘dialect levelling’ (Kerswill 223). The reasons behind this disappearance are complex, but have been ascribed both to greater mobility, as well as the effects of ‘spoken media’ in making ‘speakers more positively disposed towards the incoming forms they hear from the people they meet’ (240). Ironically, television, the very medium to which Dennis Potter would owe his living, was also one of the forces of cultural and linguistic ‘centralization’ (Potter 1962, 94) that the dramatist feared.
21There is a friction between the near-idyllic rurality of Blue Remembered Hills and the condition of the children within it. Unlike the serial Pennies from Heaven the year before, it features no scenes filmed in a studio. Studio productions were typically shot on video, while locating shooting would be done on film, meaning that plays and serials including both would feature a jarring mismatch in picture quality between the two. Shot entirely on 16mm, Blue Remembered Hills has a timelessly cinematic quality where studio productions can feel dated due to the glaring artificiality of the lighting and sets.
22Among other ambitious works for the Play for Today strand, Blue Remembered Hills can be seen the consequence of a movement, beginning in the mid-’60s, to liberate the television play from a dialogue-driven drama which ‘owes its substance to theatre’, in favour of a form which ‘forces the director . . . to shoulder the responsibility of creation’ (Kennedy Martin 23). If the spoken word in Blue Remembered Hills is still of central importance, the play is not without its cinematic touches. The rapid tracking shots that follow the progress of the boys running wildly through the trees are as technically impressive as they are evocative, capturing the thrill and abandon of youth much more expressively than speech alone. Dennis Potter’s script features short descriptions of (or instructions for) these scenes, but director Brian Gilbert and cinematographer Nat Crosby take credit for their visual interpretation.
23Unlike in Lord of the Flies, Dennis Potter’s play takes place in an environment that is not only familiar to the children but seemingly idyllic. The barn in which Donald is fatefully trapped is first presented as a scene of picturesque rurality, with a descending crane shot taking in the framing countryside, with blue skies reflected in ponds in the foreground. A similarly evocative (and technically challenging) shot takes place later in the play with an aerial shot descending slowly upon the children through the branches of the trees. This follows an ellipsis that is uncharacteristic of the rest of the play: a series of static shots of empty woodland spaces that accompany an emergency siren that has been set off. The children interpret the siren as signalling the escape of an Italian prisoner of war, but this is never given any objective confirmation in the story. These eerie static shots alert us to the children’s isolation, while hinting that the escaped prisoner is, perhaps, out there somewhere. As the play unfolds, however, it becomes clear instead that the isolation is partly what makes the children dangerous to themselves.
24If Blue Remembered Hills recalls Lord of the Flies, there is an important distinction to make. In William Golding’s novel, the protagonists are public (i.e., fee-paying) school boys from upper middle-class families, except for Piggy, whose speech is an identifier of a more modest background. In the Dennis Potter play, the children are from a less privileged social sphere. In Lord of the Flies, grown-ups represent authority and civilisation, in Blue Remembered Hills, the absent adults do not seem to provide a civilising influence at all. In one scene the children play a game whereby they take the roles of adults, notably their own parents. Some of the broader social dysfunction of Forest society thus filters back to us, and we become aware of issues of domestic violence, drunkenness and abuse. Donald, Audrey and Angela stage a scene in which a father figure returns home drunk having cut off his thumb. A marital argument is performed during which the father figure (Donald) storms off to the pub to get ‘bloody drunk’, and, when his ‘wife’ (Angela) complains, he tells her to ‘shut thee mouth, ‘ooman’ (Potter 1984, 53).
25Although the scene is largely played for comic effect, it takes a more sinister turn later when we learn, via the other children, of Donald’s mother locking him in a coal shed (57), hitting him with a shovel (‘Right round the yud’, 47), and her promiscuity, even prostitution (57). There is a nod here to the kitchen sink realism of Potter’s peers and, I would argue, a corrective to stereotypes about the English West Country being characterised by rustic charm. Despite the Biblical allusions, Blue Remembered Hills does not share the literary trope of the pastoral that Raymond Williams identified as a ‘powerful myth of modern England in which the transition from a rural to an industrial society is seen as a kind of fall’ (Williams 66). There is nothing intrinsically innocent about the children’s lives. They are not untouched by the social problems of big cities, nor is the Forest pre-industrial.
26The ‘naturalism’ of the studio play that so aggravated practitioners such as Troy Kennedy Martin was less naturalistic than stagey, borrowing a theatrical idiom, and a conventional one at that, and applying it to an audio-visual one. As John Cook argued, in finding more expressive ways to depict the human psyche, television drama such as Dennis Potter’s was ‘also paradoxically an attempt at greater realism’ (Cook 30). Little attention, however, has been paid to the way these ‘non-naturalistic’ effects work in practice. What effect does adults playing children actually have?
27Potter himself talked about the use of adults as being like a ‘magnifying glass’ (Potter 1984, 40) on childhood behaviour and emotions. The physical enlargement can be thus seen as bringing the world of children into greater relief, rather than simply distancing us from it. Blue Remembered Hills can be also read in terms of Mikhail Bakhtin’s ‘grotesque realism’, which the philosopher saw as an offshoot of the folk cultural phenomenon of the carnival. In the carnival, Bakhtin argued, ‘all that is bodily becomes grandiose, exaggerated, immeasurable’ (Bakhtin 1965, 19). Grotesque realism, according to Bakhtin, is characterised by ‘parodies, caricatures, grimaces, eccentric postures’, and ‘transition, metamorphoses, [and] the violation of natural boundaries’ (40). This can be seen in Dennis Potter’s play, in which childhood behaviour and gestures become almost monstrously exaggerated by the adult performers. This is immediately apparent from the opening scene of the play in which Colin Welland as Willie is seen gleefully splashing through the mud in oversized children’s clothes. We then see him eating his apple without any refinement, mouth open as he chews, spitting out pieces as he imagines an RAF fighter swooping down and firing upon the enemy. The performance is both plausibly authentic and comically grotesque at the same time; in some ways as ‘realistic’ as any child actor could achieve, yet heightened in ways that could easily break the illusion.
28In the folk carnival the imperfections of the body and its base needs were celebrated through laughter and mockery. For Bakhtin, this meant that the ‘human body with its food, drink, defecation and sexual life’ plays ‘a predominant role’ (Bakhtin 1965, 18). We see this in the play not only in the way that Willie eats but also in references to bodily functions. The children talk in reverent tones of an absent boy called Wallace Wilson who can ‘pee the highest’ of all them, and—much to the delight of Willie and Peter—was caught by an adult ‘peeing on a gorse bush’ (Potter 1984, 47). The boys also find great amusement in the thought of silk ‘knickers’ (43), while the girls’ play is hardly more refined.
29Blue Remembered Hills can be seen as undermining the notions of high culture that are wrapped up in the term ‘drama’, or the po-faced earnestness of social realism. The play has things to show us about class and regional identity, but it is also unvarnished and irreverent, refusing to pander to any clichés about noble savagery. As Peter says, a ‘bit of dirt never hurt anybody’ (Potter 1984, 45). The play not only magnifies the unrefined nature of the children but allows us to laugh at the absurdity of grown-ups playing the fool. Seeing adults have tantrums, giggle, and dribble is in the spirit of the carnival, whereby roles are reversed and ‘behavior, gesture, and discourse of a person are freed from the authority of all hierarchical positions’ (Bakhtin 1963, 123).
30Unlike many of Dennis Potter’s plays and serials, Blue Remembered Hills features no flashbacks, fourth-wall breaking addresses to the camera, no hallucinations, and no lip-synched songs. The play unfolds with unity of time and place, which perhaps explains its later success as a stage play. It has been suggested that the use of adults to play children is not ‘exactly an alienation effect’, because the viewer becomes ‘almost instantly accustomed’ to it (Bradshaw 2008). Potter himself called it the ‘only significant exception to ripple the surface’ (Potter 1984, 39) of naturalism in the play. Yet there are moments when this ‘ripple’ becomes much more pronounced, notably when the children start play acting their own parents. We are thus treated to the brain-teasing spectacle of adults pretending to be children pretending to be adults, a mise en abyme that briefly short-circuits the illusion. There is much discussion between the children about which role they should take in the game, with Audrey repeating several times ‘Who be I, then?’ (Potter 1984, 52). Here, the play moves closer to more radical Potter works which explore the ‘edge between realism and anti-realism, theatrical illusion and blatant theatricality’ (Vineberg 29). For all the regional specificity, there is a sense of ventriloquism about Blue Remembered Hills that counterpoints questions of authenticity.
31The role playing is also notable for the way that it introduces absent characters, expanding the children’s world without really departing from it. Alongside the dysfunctional parents, one of whom (Donald’s father) is literally missing in action, we can also count the Italian prisoner of war, and an eighth child—Wallace Wilson—whom we never see. This sense of absence, or even haunting, maps onto another major theme of the play: nostalgia. In her book The Future of Nostalgia, Svetlana Boym distinguishes between a ‘restorative nostalgia’ that fetishises the past, and a ‘reflective nostalgia’ that acknowledges ‘the uncanny and terrifying aspects of what was once homey’ (Boym 251). In Blue Remembered Hills, which belongs—like much of Potter’s work—to this latter mode, this eeriness comes in part from the partial nature of the representation, from its absences. In this respect, the play would seem to chime in with other films in the Play for Today strand such as David Halliwell’s Steps Back (1973) and the comedies of Peter Terson, in which there was ‘a recurrent theme of loss, of separation from (Northern) roots’ (Cooke 131).
32Although Blue Remembered Hills is located in the historical past, there is nothing to indicate its status as memory except, perhaps, a voiceover at the end. It is at this point that we hear the lines of the A.E. Housman poem A Shropshire Lad from which the play derives its name:
Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?
That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.
33Like Housman, Potter recognises the impossibility of return. The ‘shining’ vision of the Forest is illusory, ‘blue remembered’, with the ‘adult’ children hinting at the way that the past is mediated and distorted by the present. The allusion to ‘the land of lost content’ is also likely ironic, given how the play’s oversized ‘children’ brag, belittle and beat each other up, while the Second World War looms large in the background.
34The vision of childhood in Blue Remembered Hills is that of a reflective nostalgic who ‘does not pretend to rebuild the mythical place called home’, and whose backwards gaze is inflected by ‘defamiliarization and sense of distance’ (Boym 50). Potter’s representation of the Forest of Dean became increasingly refracted throughout his career, perhaps in correlation with a growing sense of estrangement from his roots. While A Beast with Two Backs, for The Wednesday Play in 1968, is a relatively naturalistic historical drama set in his home region, the serial Pennies from Heaven of 1978 mixes scenes from the Forest of Dean with hallucinatory sequences of singing and dancing, as well as a Bonnie & Clyde-type plot about a couple on the run. Later, The Singing Detective (1986) situates the Forest in the memory of its author-protagonist, whose childhood reminiscences become intertwined with the plot of one of his novels. Potter’s final Forest scenes would feature posthumously. In a masterfully staged parting shot, the dying author asked that his last two scripts be produced in collaboration between the BBC and Channel 4, the first of which, the four-part serial Karaoke (1996), tells the story of a writer who struggles to remember what elements of his real life he has borrowed for his screenplays. Daniel Feeld, played by Albert Finney, is an undisguised Potter surrogate who is dying of the same pancreatic cancer that would kill Potter himself. At the end of Karaoke, Feeld leaves instructions that his head be cryogenically frozen. Cold Lazarus (1996), the four-part follow up, finds Feeld reawakening from this scientific deep freeze in a dystopian future. Attempts are made to access his memories, among which are reminiscences from Feeld’s childhood in the Forest of Dean.
35Not only were Karaoke and Cold Lazarus a metacommentary on Potter’s career and its legacy, the latter seemed to anticipate how alien Forest life would appear to viewers in a distant future where English regional vernacular and culture had long been forgotten or replaced. There were, however, already hints of this distance in Blue Remembered Hills, both in the disembodied voiceover at the play’s close and in the curious absent figure of Wallace Wilson. Although apparently disposed to ‘mooching about’ on his own (Potter 1984, 46), Wallace has established himself as the dominant figure both in physical terms and intelligence. According to Willie, ‘Wallace yunt cock of the class for nothing. Wallace d’know what him’s on about, Wallace do’ (45). Peter insists that he is ‘number two’ (47) and is prepared to fight the other children to prove it, and the hierarchy established by the absent Wallace seems—like the imagined Italian—to spark conflict. Yet his absence also has other connotations, as suggested in references about him by the other children:
john: Where is Wallace Wilson today, any road?
willie: Him ant bin seen, not nowhere
john: Well, wherever him is, he’s up to summat or other, you can be sure o’that (Potter 1984, 67)
36The fact that Wallace has not been seen but is ‘up to summat’ could be seen as an authorial clin d’œil. Concerning the verses from A Shropshire Lad recited at the play’s close, John Cook suggests that it is ‘Potter (or is it Wallace Wilson?) inserting himself into the drama’ (Cook 116). There may be a clue in the name. Could Wallace Wilson be, like the eponymous character in Edgar Allan Poe’s short story ‘William Wilson’ (1839), the narrator’s double or alter ego? Wallace’s liminal status, both inside and outside the diegesis, is telling: an acknowledgement, perhaps, of the author’s hand and/or the partial, refracted nature of the representation. Wallace’s fading out of the picture, so to speak, suggests the ‘blue remembered’ nature of the story. ‘Reflective nostalgics’, such as Dennis Potter, ‘see everywhere the imperfect mirror images of home, and try to cohabit with doubles and ghosts’ (Boym 251). The curious absences—of parents, of prisoners of war, of Wallace Wilson—suggest a form of haunting that inflects the play with a sense of distance between the narrative situation (signalled by the final voiceover) and the events depicted. The outsize, grotesque embodiment of the children is contrasted with a broader world which seems to be dimming at the edges, a sense which is also reflected in those shots of empty woodland which not only emphasize the children’s isolation, but the partial quality of memory itself.
37Blue Remembered Hills distils a number of seemingly contradictory impulses in Dennis Potter’s work. On one hand it can be seen as an example of regional drama and the ascendancy of working-class, provincial writers for television, itself part of a broader cultural revolution in Britain starting in the late 1950s. As with other writers in this mode, Potter would bring attention to a regional identity hitherto underrepresented in broadcasting, and was one of the very few to do so for the West Country and the Forest of Dean in particular. In doing so, he challenged clichés about the region of his birth, while simultaneously adopting techniques that would seem to undermine any notions of social realism with which regional drama was associated. While the use of adults to play children is commonly thought to be the only non-naturalistic device in the play, its use can actually be seen as a form of greater realism. Irreverent and grotesque, Blue Remembered Hills steers the audience away from the earnestness of regional drama, while nonetheless allowing an authentic view of the lives of ordinary people at a particular place and time. Rather than just designed to break the illusion, the use of adults is also part of the play’s engagement with how we remember the past, the outsized embodiment of children contrasted with a larger cast of characters who are conspicuously absent, fading—it seems to be suggested in the play—from the author’s memory. The play is thus characterised by a sense of loss: both that of childhood but also of regional culture itself, and its distinctive patterns of speech.