4

'Banality with a Beat':

The Paradox of Popular
Culture1
Any myth with some degree of generality is in fact ambigu-
ous, because it represents the very humanity of those who,
having nothing, have borrowed it.
Roland Barthes, Mythologies (1957) 2

Would someone with a hard face please protect me from those

sickly and sugared old tunes? They tinkle-tinkle their simple
sweetness and yet somehow complicated accusations out of
the most personally demeaning residues of what had seemed
to be lost and gone for ever.
Dennis Potter, (Potter, 1994, p.43)

INTRODUCTION

Potter's work throughout his career displayed a profound fasci-

nation with the forms and forces of popular culture. Pulp fic-
tion, advertising, tabloid journalism, grade-B Hollywood cinema,
radio and television itself became recurrent and increasingly
dominant themes in his oeuvre. But it was with popular music -
especially the songs of the 1930s and 1940s - that his work has
become most associated. In particular, it was the 'lip-synch' device
for which his drama is probably most famous. As a result, he
has often been portrayed as a great 'promoter' of popular culture,
a writer, who in both his work, and his choice of medium, has
somehow epitomised the apparent breakdown of 'the great divide'
between 'high' and 'low' art. Yet while acknowledging the
significance and power of popular culture on the lives and minds

110

G. Creeber, Dennis Potter Between Two Worlds

© Glen Creeber 1998
 'Banality with a Beat' 111

of his characters, his drama frequently displayed a curious

ambiguity towards pop culture as a whole, simultaneously celebrat-
ing and ridiculing its mass appeal and sentimental inflexions.
It takes little knowledge of Potter's work to recognise its contin-
ual obsession with the products and moral consequences of con-
temporary culture. It was clearly evident in his early documentary
Between Two Rivers (1960) in which he described the hidden dangers
of modern mass culture. A critique which he later developed in
his second book, The Changing Forest: Life in the Forest of Dean
Today (1962) which derided the way modern consumerism (in-
cluding television and popular music) was destroying traditional
working-class life. That distaste for mass culture later found
expression in his journalism and his early attempts at creative
writing. In a sketch entitled 'Mother's Day' for That Was The Week
That Was (which he wrote with his Daily Herald colleague David
Nathan) he crudely attacked the banal sentiments of the televi-
sion commercial. 'What is a mum?', it asked, '[a] mum lives with
a dad and 2.4 children in a rented house where the neighbours
notice her washing on the line. A mum relies upon secret ingre-
dients and instant cake-mixes. She has kids with dirty teeth who
regularly shout, "Don't forget the Fruit Gums, Mum".' 3
Potter's first television play The Confidence Course (1965) high-
lighted the dangers of high-pressure salesmanship and its tend-
ency to prey on the weakest members of society. The following
year Emergency Ward- 9 (1966) subverted the formulaic conven-
tions of the television soap opera, while Where the Buffalo Roam
(1966) dramatised an illiterate teenager's obsession with the
Hollywood cinema. 4 No longer able to distinguish between real-
ity and the heroic images of the western, its protagonist finally
shoots his mother and grandfather before being shot himself by
the Swansea police force. Two years later The Bonegrinder (1968)
portrayed the hidden dangers of England's rapid 'Americanisation'
as a whole, while Paper Roses (1971) dramatised the immoral and
sordid world of tabloid journalism. In Follow the Yellow Brick Road
(1972) he returned to the blatant and acquisitive banalities of
television advertising. Here, however, its deluded and disturbed
protagonist appears to find 'spiritual salvation' in their vision of
a perfect world.
It is with popular music, however, that Potter's work is probably
most associated. One has only to look at the origins of so many
of his titles to appreciate its powerful and unmistakable significance