Widely regarded as one of the most significant British television dramatists, Dennis Potter was one of the so-called Angry Young Men, writers of the post- World War II, end-of-British Empire period who re-evaluated British society and culture. Initially, the best known of them were playwrights such as John Osborne, Harold Pinter, and Arnold Wesker and prose-fiction writers such as John Wain, Kingsley Amis, and Alan Sillitoe, but in the junior medium of television there were writers just as "angry" and just as committed to making sense of seismic postwar shifts. Many of these writers came to the forefront in the 1960s, and Potter, who also made his contribution to the British stage, is foremost among them, taking more account than most of the importance of the 1930s and the 1940s in forging the identity of welfare-state Britain.

Dennis Christopher George Potter was born on 17 May 1935 into a working-class...