SOURCE: "The Last Blast," in New Statesman and Society, June 17, 1994, p. 40.

In the following brief obituary Tonkin comments on Potter's life and influence.

The green remembered glades from Dennis Potter's Forest of Dean childhood nestle on the edge of the Cotswold Euro-constituency, which Labour came within 4,000 votes of capturing this week. Among his many roles, the late playwright gave new voice to the survival of a historic rural radicalism. He helped explode the lie that only the metropolitan "chattering classes" really bother about social change. Potter was many things; but he was never trendy.

In spite of these roots, though, his journey up what he called "the tick-tick-tick examination ladder" pulled him up fast into the core of national culture. His early plays went out at prime-time, on BBC1 and even on the long-forgotten Rediffusion. Can you imagine a Potter premiere on Carlton?

That centrality, with all its...