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“... a writer could do more with a Dalek would be to unite him with Basil Fawlty. Except that the dying Dennis Potter went further, maybe, when he called John Birt, the BBC’s then director-general, ‘a croak-voiced Dalek’ in 1993. Much expectation surrounded Doctor Who’s return last year, into an industry that has changed vastly since he went away. Mark ...”

“... repetitive and somewhat self-pitying or sentimental, saw other talents come down from university: Dennis Potter, for example, with his striking power to re-create a setting, a culture, a range of characters different from each other or from their author; or Don Taylor, whose sense of the 17th century is so much harder, more social and more ...”

“... an empty Leeds and the train to King’s Cross. 10 September. Watch some of a programme about Dennis Potter, but the assumptions it makes about the relationship between art and life are so naive and wide-eyed and scarcely above the tabloid level that I don’t persist. It takes Potter at his own self-valuation ...”

“... the Open University and the new wave of BBC comedy and drama (Dad’s Army, Monty Python, Dennis Potter). This was part of a cultural revival. Union Jacks began to appear in the oddest places: on Mary Quant miniskirts and draped round the shoulders of Pete Townshend (Patriots is always keen to assert the world-beating quality of British ...”

“... A little over a year ago, a very good play was screened on BBC Television, Dennis Potter’s Blue Remembered Hills. A troupe of adult actors climbed into shorts and re-enacted the days of Potter’s youth – fights, ordeals, boasts, burnings, with an Indian file of girls manoeuvring in relation to the Indian file of boys, each brave or squaw as solemn as Sioux ...”

“... impute, is lost by Wodehouse, and turned into a mutually jokey fantasy from the world of Catsmeat Potter-Pirbright and Gussie Fink-Nottle. Intellectuals, and journalists looking for worms in the apple, find it hard to forgive Wodehouse for being so apparently sunny and straightforward. Surely there must be some dark secret somewhere? Reviews of his letters ...”

“... Richard Hoggart loves shopping. It is not just the fact that, being retired, he can now potter off at hours when others are chained to their desks; even in The Uses of Literacy there were signs that we were talking serious shopping. Love of a bargain is one thing at work here (he reports with some pride that even now most of the books he buys are ...”

“... Greek names could be meaningful but that they were meant. It is no accident that an Athenian potter named his potter-to-be son ‘Good with His Hands’ (Eucheir), or that ‘He Who Loves Horses’ named a daughter ‘Thessalian Victory’ (Thessalonike), and there is some evidence for political sloganeering in the use ...”

“... space, not just for Edge of Darkness, but for Alan Bleasdale’s Boys from the Blackstuff (1981), Dennis Potter’s sexually provocative and formally challenging Singing Detective (1986) and Richard Eyre’s film of Charles Wood’s anti-Falklands Tumbledown (1988). When a newly aggressive ITV, freed from its franchise limitations by the 1990 ...”