SOURCE: "Surreptitious Overturnings," in Times Literary Supplement, No. 4695, March 26, 1993, p. 17.

In this short review of Potter on Potter and Lipstick on Your Collar, Imlah briefly examines the elements of Potter's dramatic devices.

Dennis Potter is exceptional: a television dramatist worth the weight of a whole book of interviews. What justifies Potter on Potter, though, is less the special quality of the work it analyses—some of which was screened once and can never be seen again—than the hard intelligence with which Potter surveys the personal history that informs his plays to such an unusual extent: the working-class upbringing in the Forest of Dean, National Service, the scholarship to Oxford that severed him from his roots, and above all, the crippling and disfiguring illness, psoriatic arthropathy, which struck at twenty-six to deny him a life in politics but about which, even at its first outbreak, he claims to...