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1
Casanova (1971)
7.4/10on IMDb
First aired
Potter's first serial, six episodes on BBC2 in late 1971, with Frank Finlay as the libertine serving a five-year prison sentence and looking back on the women in his life. The scenes jump out of chronological order, an early taste of the fractured storytelling that became his signature. Its frankness drew complaints to the BBC, and Mary Whitehouse went after it from the first episodes.
Watch it to see the obsessions with desire, guilt and religion that run through everything that follows, before the songs arrived.
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Late Call (1975)
7.0/10on IMDb
First aired
Four episodes on BBC2 in March 1975, adapted from Angus Wilson's 1964 novel. Dandy Nichols plays Sylvia Calvert, who retires after a lifetime of hotel service and moves with her husband into their widowed son's home in a new town.
Potter took the novel's prologue, set in the hot summer of 1911, and made it the heart of the drama, cutting between that summer and the present. So even a faithful literary adaptation turns into one of his memory pieces. It is the quietest serial here, a good pick if you want to see how he worked on someone else's book.
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The Mayor of Casterbridge (1978)
7.9/10on IMDb
First aired
Seven parts on BBC2 in early 1978, from Thomas Hardy's novel, with Alan Bates as Michael Henchard, the hay-trusser who sells his wife at a country fair and spends the rest of his life paying for it. Directed by David Giles and filmed entirely on location in Dorset, much of it around Corfe Castle.
This is Potter at his most classical, a straight period drama with none of the formal games of his own serials. Pick it for Bates's towering lead and to see how well Potter could serve another writer when he chose to.
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Pennies from Heaven (1978)
8.3/10on IMDb
First aired
The one that changed everything. Six episodes of about 75 minutes each on BBC1 in 1978, with Bob Hoskins as Arthur Parker, a traveling sheet-music salesman in the mid-1930s, frustrated in his marriage in the London suburbs.
It was the first Potter work where characters burst into full performances of popular songs, with Al Bowlly's voice all over the soundtrack, and the gap between those sweet lyrics and Arthur's grubby, desperate life is the whole point. It won the BAFTA for Most Original Programme and made Hoskins an established actor in Britain. Go in knowing it turns very dark.
More about Pennies from Heaven5
Tender Is the Night (1985)
8.1/10on IMDb
First aired
Potter's adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel, a BBC co-production with 20th Century Fox, shown in six episodes in fall 1985. Peter Strauss and Mary Steenburgen play Dick and Nicole Diver, the glamorous couple on the 1920s French Riviera whose marriage is strained by Nicole's mental illness.
Rather than the published book's order, Potter followed the chronological rearrangement Malcolm Cowley made in 1951 from Fitzgerald's own notes, so the story unfolds in time order. It was widely praised but has been seldom seen since, so treat it as a find for Fitzgerald fans who want the Riviera years given room to breathe.
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The Singing Detective (1986)
8.6/10on IMDb
First aired
The masterpiece, and the best place to start. Six episodes on BBC1 on Sunday nights in late 1986, with Michael Gambon as Philip Marlow, a blocked mystery writer stuck in a hospital bed with acute psoriatic arthropathy, the skin and joint disease Potter himself lived with.
Marlow's fevered mind tangles three strands: the detective plot he keeps reworking in his head, his childhood in the Forest of Dean, where Potter was born and the serial was filmed, and the ward around him. Running through all of it, characters lip-sync 1930s and 1940s songs in surreal musical numbers. It sits 20th on the BFI's 2000 list of the greatest British television programs.
More about The Singing Detective7
Christabel (1988)
6.5/10on IMDb
First aired
Four hour-long episodes on BBC2 in late 1988, adapted from the memoirs of Christabel Bielenberg, an Englishwoman married to a German lawyer, who spent World War II living in Nazi Germany. Elizabeth Hurley plays her in one of her earliest leading roles.
This is the most conventional thing on the list, a sober true story told straight, and it shows Potter's restraint as an adapter. Choose it if you want wartime drama about ordinary people under pressure, less if you came for the strangeness.
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Blackeyes (1989)
6.9/10on IMDb
First aired
The most divisive serial Potter made, and the only time he directed for television. Four 50-minute episodes on BBC2 from November to December 1989, adapted from his own novel, with Gina Bellman as a fashion model and Michael Gough as the elderly uncle who turns her life into a bestseller.
It is a hall of mirrors about who gets to tell a woman's story and who profits, and most of the British press hated it; the Sunday Times summed it up as "Porno Twaddle." A few critics stood up for it, one calling it possibly his most original and honest work since Pennies from Heaven. Watch it once you know his style, and decide for yourself.
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Lipstick on Your Collar (1993)
8.1/10on IMDb
First aired
The lightest and most purely fun of the song serials, and the last broadcast in Potter's lifetime. Six episodes on Channel 4 in early 1993, set in a military intelligence office in Whitehall in 1956 as the Suez crisis builds.
Ewan McGregor, in his first major role, plays Mick Hopper, a national service clerk translating Russian documents who daydreams his stuffy colleagues into rock and roll numbers, with Connie Francis's title song opening each episode. If The Singing Detective feels like too much to start with, this romantic comedy is the friendliest way in to how Potter uses songs.
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Karaoke (1996)
8.1/10on IMDb
First aired
Written while Potter was dying of pancreatic cancer and shown two years after his death, in four episodes in spring 1996. At his request it was a joint production of the BBC and Channel 4, airing on BBC1 on Sunday evenings with Channel 4 repeating it the next day.
Albert Finney plays Daniel Feeld, an aging writer watching his new screenplay being filmed, who starts to find its characters and lines turning up in the real world around him. It is Potter looking back at his own methods with a wry, mortal eye. Watch it straight before Cold Lazarus, since Potter thought of the pair as one eight-part piece.
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Cold Lazarus (1996)
7.6/10on IMDb
First aired
Potter's only science fiction, and his final serial. Four episodes in May and June 1996, first on Channel 4 and repeated on BBC1 the next day, picking up where Karaoke leaves off.
In a 24th-century Britain run by American oligarchs, scientists work on the frozen head of Daniel Feeld, again played by Albert Finney, while a media tycoon plans to make a fortune broadcasting his memories on TV. Frances de la Tour and Ciarán Hinds co-star. It is uneven and sometimes clunky, but as a dying writer's argument about memory, money and what television is for, it is unlike anything else on TV.
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