Items11The creator’s order
  1. 1Casanova (1971)Casanova (1971) 7.4/10 on IMDbFirst aired Nov 16, 1971Potter'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…0
  2. 2Late Call (1975)Late Call (1975) 7.0/10 on IMDbFirst aired Mar 1, 1975Four 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,…0
  3. 3The Mayor of Casterbridge (1978)The Mayor of Casterbridge (1978) 7.9/10 on IMDbFirst aired Jan 22, 1978Seven 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…0
  4. 4Pennies from Heaven (1978)Pennies from Heaven (1978) 8.3/10 on IMDbFirst aired Mar 7, 1978The 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…0
  5. 5Tender Is the Night (1985)Tender Is the Night (1985) 8.1/10 on IMDbFirst aired Sep 23, 1985Potter'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…0
  6. 6The Singing Detective (1986)The Singing Detective (1986) 8.6/10 on IMDbFirst aired Nov 16, 1986The 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…0
  7. 7Christabel (1988)Christabel (1988) 6.5/10 on IMDbFirst aired Nov 16, 1988Four 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…0
  8. 8Blackeyes (1989)Blackeyes (1989) 6.9/10 on IMDbFirst aired Nov 29, 1989The 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…0
  9. 9Lipstick on Your Collar (1993)Lipstick on Your Collar (1993) 8.1/10 on IMDbFirst aired Feb 21, 1993The 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…0
  10. 10Karaoke (1996)Karaoke (1996) 8.1/10 on IMDbFirst aired Apr 28, 1996Written 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,…0