Casanova (1971)

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.