Trouble in Paradise

I am a semi-factual character in a novel by Dennis Potter. Or, perhaps I am semi-fictional? The line seems blurred.
Perhaps I should explain. It was the summer of 1986 and I was still broke, starving, and awaiting fame and fortune to thrust itself upon me. My telephone rang and I picked it up.

“Aaaagh! Aaaagh!” Were my first words.

“Hello” might have been better, but my two kittens, Santos and Creole, had chosen that moment to leap up and grab my wrist by their claws and were now suspended in mid-air, drawing blood, and desperately trying to hang on. At the other end of the line was the slightly deafened Art Director of BLITZ magazine asking me if I’d like to photograph some old geezer by the name of Potter.
If truth be known, I’d never heard of him, but apparently he was some kind of genius; a novelist, playwright and screenwriter.
I, for one, imagined him, threadbare, moth-eaten, and ink-stained. The BBC was about to televise his new screenplay called ‘The Singing Detective’.

Don’t you just love musicals?

The address I was given was on New Cavendish Street in Central London, not far from my tiny studio in Marylebone. This was Potter’s office, and where he converted his inner angst to prose. It was a hot and humid summer’s day, and there was no lift (elevator), so I was not in the best of moods after staggering up five flights of stairs with my cameras, lights and tripod.
Jon Wilde, the ‘star’ journalist from BLITZ magazine, opened the door.
It was difficult to squeeze past due to the size of his ego.

“Okay!” He announced, with a supposed air of authority.
“I’ll give you fifteen minutes, take some pictures and go.”

“Excuse me?” I replied, a little startled by this affront.

“Listen, you have to understand,” he crooned, “an interview is one on one mate, ‘mano a mano’, it’s all about the rapport.”
“Now just take some bloody pictures an’ bugger off!” He insisted.

Like a red rag to a bull, we light the blue touch paper and stand well back.

“Now hold on just a damn minute. What do you think a bloody
portrait is?”

I screamed back at him.

“They didn’t send me down here to take a bloody snapshot did they? I’ve got to talk to the guy, find out what he’s all about: check out his personality, his mannerisms and such. Besides, this is a four-page story, I’ve got two pages, and you’ve got two pages; equal time, equal billing.”

i.e. “FUCK OFF!”

My blood was boiling.

At this point Potter, who I had barely had a chance to acknowledge, chirped up.
He’d been sitting quietly at his desk, in front of an enormous manual typewriter that looked like some kind of ‘spinning jenny’. He was wearing a grey shirt, a striped knitted tie and a bemused grin.
“Boys! Boys!” He uttered with obvious condescension.
“You know, I didn’t ask to do this interview, and quite frankly, I don’t really need to. But, if you would like to ask me some questions.” Nodding his head in the general direction of Jon,
“And, if you would like to take some pictures.” Whilst glancing up at me. “But, let’s get on with it shall we.”

As you can imagine, this was a little bit embarrassing for the both of us, so I began hurriedly plugging in lights and trying to look professional and efficient. Meanwhile, Jon sat down and opened his notebook.

“Well Mr. Potter, what do you think of the Welsh?”

This was Jon’s opening gambit.
It had nothing to do with Potter or his screenplay, and everything to do with Jon’s wild Welsh obsession with himself.
It was, I knew, a huge mistake.

“I hate the FUCKERS. The first Welshman I met tried to bite my ear off in a Rugby scrum. I hope you’re not fucking Welsh.”

Of course, knowing full well that he was.

The interview went pretty much downhill from there, as Jon proceeded with one pretentious question after another.
Potter quite obviously couldn’t stand such ‘intellectual’ masturbation and took great delight in carving him up.
He was easily one of the brightest minds that I had come across, and it was with great delight that I watched him slice through Jon like a sharp knife through Welsh rarebit, belittling him at every opportunity. At one point, quite obviously upset, Jon slammed down his pen and stuttered.

“Mr. Potter, how c-can you c-concentrate on my questions with all this infernal c-click, click, cer-licking going on?”

“Oh,” replied Potter, innocently. “I really hadn’t noticed.”

I mean, it was fucking classic.

Dennis Potter suffered for many years with a terrible skin disease called psoriatic arthropathy, much like the main character in ‘The Singing Detective’.
He was in great pain for much of the time and his hands were now clenched permanently into stumpy fists. He used to pound away with his knuckles on his old Remington Manual, chain-smoking intensely. He had a very interesting way of smoking necessitated by his condition. He would pick up a packet of Silk Cut with his stumps, open it with his mouth and suck out a fag. He then struck a huge desk lighter with his fist, bent down and inhaled. I took some pictures of him doing this, but he asked me not to publish them and I think I gave him my word.

I may have said “Scout’s honor.” It was a long time ago.

After the interview was over I took a few more frames of Dennis by a window, but he was visibly tiring so I packed up my gear, thanked him, and went home.

Jon went back to the magazine and had me fired. They ran the pictures, but I never worked for them again. A few years later,
I happened to pick up a copy of BLITZ magazine from a news-stand, I hadn’t read it in a very long time so serendipity was obviously at play. There was an article by Jon saying that he was going to be the star of the new Dennis Potter TV Series based on his latest novel ‘Black-eyes’. He was going to be played by Nigel Planer (Neal from ‘The Young Ones’).

He then told his version of our story.
Firstly, he said that I had turned up on the wrong day, which anyone who knows anything about assignment photography will tell you is “Bollocks!”
You turn up when your editor tells you to.
Secondly, he said that the interview took place at Potter’s house, which it blatantly did not. He painted himself as the ‘young gun’ ace journalist, and me, with malicious intent, as the ne’er do well.

I ran into the nearest bookstore, Waterstones on the Charing Cross Road, bought a copy of ‘Black-eyes’ and read it on the number 12 bus on the way home to Camberwell Green. In the book, a character obviously based on Potter, an old curmudgeon of a writer, is being interviewed by a journalist from KRITZ magazine. Potter’s version of the events, and his opinion of the journalist are, funnily enough, very similar to my own. The photographer incidentally, had become a cocky, cockney ‘Bailey-esque’ Jack the lad called Colin. (Colin? Yeah, thanks Dennis)

I took a yellow marker pen and hi-lighted all the lines where Potter’s character was calling the journalist a pretentious wanker and mailed it off to Jon with a note.

“Dear Jon, I hope that this refreshes your memory.”

Of course, when the TV series was eventually shown, two relative unknowns played the characters based on Jon and myself, and Nigel Planer played the boyfriend of the model, ‘Black-eyes’. (Jane from Coupling) We were a recurring subplot, a token of Potter’s vanity, and now my own.

Fourteen years later, I was at my friend Mark’s fortieth birthday party at a Russian Vodka bar in New York City called PRAVDA. I began chatting with Mark’s next-door neighbor, Stephen Colvin, the President of Dennis publishing, who published MAXIM, Stuff, and BLENDER magazines. Potter’s name somehow cropped up in conversation and I drunkenly told Stephen my own Potter story.
I also mentioned that Jon was now a contributing writer at Maxim magazine.

“Not anymore he isn’t. As of Monday, he’s fired!” Growled Stephen.

I don’t know if Jon ever did get the pink slip, but I like to think so.

Revenge is a dish best served cold.

Much like Vodka really.





In 1994, in my apartment in Tribeca, I watched Potter’s last interview with the brilliant Melvyn Bragg for ‘The South Bank Show’. He was dying from a pancreatic Cancer that he liked to call ‘Rupert’ after Rupert Murdoch, the Media baron and owner of the Fox News network. Potter sat on an empty, darkened stage, like a contestant on ‘Mastermind’. He talked softly, in a quiet contemplative way, and whenever the pain got too much, he would take a swig from a flask of morphine that he kept on the floor by his chair. I have to admit that I shed a tear.

He died on 4th June 1994, eight days after the death of his beloved wife Margaret.

R.I.P.