SOURCE: "Potent Cliches and Painful Truths," in The Observer, June 12, 1994, p. 5.

[In the following essay, Naughton eulogizes Potter's life and career, describing him as a "great artist" and "the first—and so far the only—television dramatist to produce works which approach the complexity and power of great novelists."]

It was his handwriting I noticed first: gossamer-thin strokes of a felt-tip pen, like the trail of a literary spider. I was working on the New Stateman at the time (the early Seventies), and he was our television critic. Someone (probably his wife, Margaret, who died of cancer two weeks ago) used to bring in his copy on Wednesdays. In my ignorance, I asked why it wasn't typed like everyone else's, and someone had to explain to me that his arthritis made it impossible for him to use a typewriter, or even a conventional ball-point or fountain pen. The...