Where Adam Stood
Encyclopedia
Where Adam Stood is a television play
by Dennis Potter
, first broadcast on BBC2
in 1976. It is a free adaptation of Edmund Gosse
's autobiographical book Father and Son (1907).
and Minister of the Plymouth Brethren
, and his young son Edmund
are in mourning for the recent death of Mrs Gosse
; the household held together by religious piety and strict bible study. Despite the claustrophobic environment, Edmund experiences brief moments of joy when his father allows him to view the exotic flora and fauna
he keeps in his aquarium
as part of his studies. Edmund, however, is troubled by nightmares of a Christ-like figure on a beach beckoning towards him. Confiding in his father about these terrible dreams, he reveals that his recent prayers have been to ask God for a toy sailing boat he has seen for sale in the window of a village shop. Gosse forces Edmund to pray and manipulates him into saying that God will not grant him his wish on the grounds that it is distracting him from spiritual matters.
One day the house receives a guest in the form of Mr Brackley: a naturalist visiting Mr Gosse on behalf of Charles Darwin
. Darwin is about to publish his seminal work On the Origin of the Species by Means of Natural Selection and, aware of Gosse's reputation in the field of natural science, asks for his support in the face of a potential outcry against the Royal Society
. Gosse rejects Darwin's theories on the grounds that they cannot be reconciled with his religious beliefs and politely asks Brackley to leave. Despite his conviction that the story of Genesis is literally true
, the encounter leads Gosse into questioning his faith; his own studies into marine biology demonstrate that species are not immutable, yet he is troubled at the thought that this challenges the validity of Creation given in the bible. He spends the rest of the evening ruminating on the problem.
The next day, Edmund and the Gosse's housekeeper Miss Marks are in the village running an errand when Edmund sees the toy sailboat in the shop window. When Miss Marks' back is turned Edmund is confronted by Mary Teague, the village 'mad woman', who takes him into the woods and sexually assaults him. Edmund manages to get away by hitting her in the face with a stone and rejoins Miss Marks, who is angry that Edmund left her. They hurry back to the house as Gosse is expecting an important visitor that afternoon, Charles Kingsley
, with whom he wishes to discuss a book he intends to write
reconciling the biblical story with Darwin's findings.
Later that evening, as the two men are talking, Edmund has a coughing fit. Kingsley is surprised at Gosse's lack of concern for his son, and is especially taken back when Gosse sends Edmund up to bed with no supper for failing to memorise a bible passage. As Edmund prepares for bed, Gosse tells him that he is sorry that Edmund is feeling unwell and attempts to reassure him by telling him he "will soon join [his] mother." Although frightened by his father's words, Edmund attempts to get some sleep. Meanwhile, Gosse and Kingsley resume their discussion. Gosse explains to Kingsley that Darwin is incorrect in assuming that the earth is much older than it appears, and that the species upon it have adapted to suit their environment over time. He uses the example of Adam's navel as a means of reconciling Darwin's studies with scripture. Gosse reasons that if Adam was intended to be the model of humanity he would have a navel despite having no mother; if this is the case then Genesis is merely a "cutting in" to Creation, and God has specifically designed every life form upon the earth, including man himself, to appear as though a continuing cycle of change and adaptation has taken place. Suddenly a cry is heard from upstairs — Edmund is having another bad dream. Gosse goes up to see him and Edmund admits that he has been thinking about the toy sailboat again. Gosse insists that they both pray to God to settle the matter one last time. He turns to face Edmund and asks what God's judgement is; Edmund tells his father that God says he is to have the sailboat. Gosse, confused and troubled by this revelation, leaves Edmund's bedroom. After he exits, Edmund places a chair against the door and returns to sleep. The play concludes with a voice-over taken from Mr Brackley's earlier meeting with Gosse:
about the life of Giacomo Casanova
, Where Adam Stood is a loose adaptation of original source material set within a fictional framework. In Potter on Potter, the author told editor Graham Fuller that he used only a few pages of Father and Son as his starting point, and rejected the resultant play's status as a straight adaptation. Instead, Potter saw the play as part of a loose trilogy exploring an individual's choices (or rather, lack of them) in the face of seemingly omniscient forces; Where Adam Stood was to form the last part, preceded by Double Dare
and Brimstone and Treacle
, respectively (both 1976). The BBC's decision not to broadcast Brimstone effectively ended this idea, although Potter would continue to refer to the three as a connected trilogy in interviews and critical essays. Potter would also later tell Fuller that he considered Where Adam Stood to be amongst the "most satisfying" of his plays.
Where Adam Stood, however, was written at a very difficult time for Potter. In 1974, his father died and this, coupled with a severe bout of psoriatic arthropathy, led to Potter developing writer's block
. Double Dare was a reflection on the problems he was having writing, while Brimstone was written in response to the ravages of his debilitating illness; Where Adam Stood was Potter's reflection on the communication problems he faced in his relationship with his father.
is represented by Mary Teague's sexual attack on the young Edmund in the woods, which Potter later described as a "physical acknowledgement" that the world is not as innocent or good as Edmund had previously been led to believe. This sequence, which does not feature in Gosse's original book, is one of many that ties into the central theme of Edmund reclaiming himself from his father, who acts as the mouthpiece for an omniscient and unseen God. The boy's final act of using his prayers to deceive his father into allowing him to have the toy sailboat was, Potter explained, "a form of betrayal" and one that was "deeply rooted in [Philip Gosse's] religious language [...] He has observed the boy praying, but because his own faith has been tested he no longer knows what God expects of him anymore."
is derived from a passage in which he states that his mother banned all fictional stories from the house on the grounds that fiction was a form of lies. He writes "I was familiar with humming-birds but had never heard of fairies. Jack the Giant Killer, Rumpelstiltskin and Robin Hood were not of my acquiantance".
Edmund's description of his father's studies towards the publication of Omphalos place it in the context of the debates about Charles Lyell
's geology, which emphasised that the earth was millions of years old, and recent work by various naturalists including Thomas Vernon Wollaston
, Joseph Dalton Hooker
and Alfred Russel Wallace
. In the play, only Darwin's as-yet unpublished work is mentioned. Philip Gosse is visited to secure his support for it. This incident derives from the following passage in Father and Son:
However Edmund makes it clear that Lyell's geology was the object his father's hatred, not Darwin himself, for whom he had "a profound esteem". In fact Darwin is never criticised in Omphalos, which is subtitled "an attempt to untie the geological knot". He is mentioned approvingly in passing twice, whereas Darwin's tutor Adam Sedgwick
is repeatedly attacked. Sedgwick was an old earth creationist who believed that God had miraculously created and then caused the extinction of separate immutable species in sequence over millions of years as a sign of his power. Evolutionary theory is only briefly mentioned when the 1844 evolutionary tract Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation
is dismissed because "this writer has hatched a scheme by which the immediate ancestor of Adam was a Chimpanzee and his remote ancestor a Maggot!".
The role of Charles Kingsley
in the drama derives from a letter he wrote to Gosse senior, cited by Edmund, in which he stated:
In the play, the use of the expression "survival of the fittest" is attributed to Darwin; in reality it was first coined by Herbert Spencer
in his Principals of Biology (1864).
dialect; this is used many times in Potter's original works.
'Mary Teague' appears, in name if not in person, in several Potter plays. In A Beast With Two Backs
(1968) she is a miner's wife, whose husband's infidelity drives the play's narrative. She is also referred to in Cream in My Coffee
(1980), when the curmudgeonly Bernard Wilsher (played by Lionel Jeffries
) reminisces about a 'Mrs Teague' who used to live in his village; describing her as a "mad old woman with a cat".
The biblical passage Edmund attempts to memorise throughout the course of the play is the Epistle of St Paul to the Philippians
. Potter had previously used this passage as the centrepiece to his 1972 drama Follow the Yellow Brick Road
.
's Potter season, marking the tenth anniversary of his death.
Television play
From the 1950s until the early 1980s, the television play was a popular television programming genre in the United Kingdom, with a shorter span in the United States. The genre was often associated with the social realist-influenced British drama style known as "kitchen sink realism", which depicted...
by Dennis Potter
Dennis Potter
Dennis Christopher George Potter was an English dramatist, best known for The Singing Detective. His widely acclaimed television dramas mixed fantasy and reality, the personal and the social. He was particularly fond of using themes and images from popular culture.-Biography:Dennis Potter was born...
, first broadcast on BBC2
BBC Two
BBC Two is the second television channel operated by the British Broadcasting Corporation in the United Kingdom. It covers a wide range of subject matter, but tending towards more 'highbrow' programmes than the more mainstream and popular BBC One. Like the BBC's other domestic TV and radio...
in 1976. It is a free adaptation of Edmund Gosse
Edmund Gosse
Sir Edmund William Gosse CB was an English poet, author and critic; the son of Philip Henry Gosse and Emily Bowes.-Early life:...
's autobiographical book Father and Son (1907).
Synopsis
Philip Gosse, naturalistNatural history
Natural history is the scientific research of plants or animals, leaning more towards observational rather than experimental methods of study, and encompasses more research published in magazines than in academic journals. Grouped among the natural sciences, natural history is the systematic study...
and Minister of the Plymouth Brethren
Plymouth Brethren
The Plymouth Brethren is a conservative, Evangelical Christian movement, whose history can be traced to Dublin, Ireland, in the late 1820s. Although the group is notable for not taking any official "church name" to itself, and not having an official clergy or liturgy, the title "The Brethren," is...
, and his young son Edmund
Edmund Gosse
Sir Edmund William Gosse CB was an English poet, author and critic; the son of Philip Henry Gosse and Emily Bowes.-Early life:...
are in mourning for the recent death of Mrs Gosse
Emily Bowes
Emily Bowes Gosse was a Victorian painter and illustrator, and writer of evangelical Christian poems and tracts.-Biography:...
; the household held together by religious piety and strict bible study. Despite the claustrophobic environment, Edmund experiences brief moments of joy when his father allows him to view the exotic flora and fauna
Marine biology
Marine biology is the scientific study of organisms in the ocean or other marine or brackish bodies of water. Given that in biology many phyla, families and genera have some species that live in the sea and others that live on land, marine biology classifies species based on the environment rather...
he keeps in his aquarium
Aquarium
An aquarium is a vivarium consisting of at least one transparent side in which water-dwelling plants or animals are kept. Fishkeepers use aquaria to keep fish, invertebrates, amphibians, marine mammals, turtles, and aquatic plants...
as part of his studies. Edmund, however, is troubled by nightmares of a Christ-like figure on a beach beckoning towards him. Confiding in his father about these terrible dreams, he reveals that his recent prayers have been to ask God for a toy sailing boat he has seen for sale in the window of a village shop. Gosse forces Edmund to pray and manipulates him into saying that God will not grant him his wish on the grounds that it is distracting him from spiritual matters.
One day the house receives a guest in the form of Mr Brackley: a naturalist visiting Mr Gosse on behalf of Charles Darwin
Charles Darwin
Charles Robert Darwin FRS was an English naturalist. He established that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestry, and proposed the scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called natural selection.He published his theory...
. Darwin is about to publish his seminal work On the Origin of the Species by Means of Natural Selection and, aware of Gosse's reputation in the field of natural science, asks for his support in the face of a potential outcry against the Royal Society
Royal Society
The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, known simply as the Royal Society, is a learned society for science, and is possibly the oldest such society in existence. Founded in November 1660, it was granted a Royal Charter by King Charles II as the "Royal Society of London"...
. Gosse rejects Darwin's theories on the grounds that they cannot be reconciled with his religious beliefs and politely asks Brackley to leave. Despite his conviction that the story of Genesis is literally true
Creationism
Creationism is the religious beliefthat humanity, life, the Earth, and the universe are the creation of a supernatural being, most often referring to the Abrahamic god. As science developed from the 18th century onwards, various views developed which aimed to reconcile science with the Genesis...
, the encounter leads Gosse into questioning his faith; his own studies into marine biology demonstrate that species are not immutable, yet he is troubled at the thought that this challenges the validity of Creation given in the bible. He spends the rest of the evening ruminating on the problem.
The next day, Edmund and the Gosse's housekeeper Miss Marks are in the village running an errand when Edmund sees the toy sailboat in the shop window. When Miss Marks' back is turned Edmund is confronted by Mary Teague, the village 'mad woman', who takes him into the woods and sexually assaults him. Edmund manages to get away by hitting her in the face with a stone and rejoins Miss Marks, who is angry that Edmund left her. They hurry back to the house as Gosse is expecting an important visitor that afternoon, Charles Kingsley
Charles Kingsley
Charles Kingsley was an English priest of the Church of England, university professor, historian and novelist, particularly associated with the West Country and northeast Hampshire.-Life and character:...
, with whom he wishes to discuss a book he intends to write
Omphalos (book)
Omphalos: An Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot is a book by Philip Gosse, written in 1857 , in which he argues that the fossil record is not evidence of evolution, but rather that it is an act of creation inevitably made so that the world would appear to be older than it is...
reconciling the biblical story with Darwin's findings.
Later that evening, as the two men are talking, Edmund has a coughing fit. Kingsley is surprised at Gosse's lack of concern for his son, and is especially taken back when Gosse sends Edmund up to bed with no supper for failing to memorise a bible passage. As Edmund prepares for bed, Gosse tells him that he is sorry that Edmund is feeling unwell and attempts to reassure him by telling him he "will soon join [his] mother." Although frightened by his father's words, Edmund attempts to get some sleep. Meanwhile, Gosse and Kingsley resume their discussion. Gosse explains to Kingsley that Darwin is incorrect in assuming that the earth is much older than it appears, and that the species upon it have adapted to suit their environment over time. He uses the example of Adam's navel as a means of reconciling Darwin's studies with scripture. Gosse reasons that if Adam was intended to be the model of humanity he would have a navel despite having no mother; if this is the case then Genesis is merely a "cutting in" to Creation, and God has specifically designed every life form upon the earth, including man himself, to appear as though a continuing cycle of change and adaptation has taken place. Suddenly a cry is heard from upstairs — Edmund is having another bad dream. Gosse goes up to see him and Edmund admits that he has been thinking about the toy sailboat again. Gosse insists that they both pray to God to settle the matter one last time. He turns to face Edmund and asks what God's judgement is; Edmund tells his father that God says he is to have the sailboat. Gosse, confused and troubled by this revelation, leaves Edmund's bedroom. After he exits, Edmund places a chair against the door and returns to sleep. The play concludes with a voice-over taken from Mr Brackley's earlier meeting with Gosse:
Principal cast
- Alan BadelAlan BadelAlan Fernand Badel was a distinguished English stage actor who also appeared frequently in the cinema, radio and television and was noted for his richly textured voice which was once described as "the sound of tears".-Early life:...
as Philip Gosse - Max Harris as Edmund GosseEdmund GosseSir Edmund William Gosse CB was an English poet, author and critic; the son of Philip Henry Gosse and Emily Bowes.-Early life:...
- Heather Canning as Miss Marks
- Gareth Forwood as Mr Brackley
- Jean BohtJean BohtJean Boht is an English actress.She is most famous for the role of Nellie Boswell in Carla Lane's comedy Bread....
as Mary Teague - Ronald HinesRonald HinesRonald Hines is a British television actor.He has had a lengthy career, but possibly his best known role was as the husband in three of the four series of Not in Front of the Children...
as Charles KingsleyCharles KingsleyCharles Kingsley was an English priest of the Church of England, university professor, historian and novelist, particularly associated with the West Country and northeast Hampshire.-Life and character:...
Production
As with Potter's 1971 serialCasanova (1971 TV serial)
Casanova is a British television drama serial, written by television playwright Dennis Potter. Directed by Mark Cullingham and John Glenister, the serial was made by the BBC and screened on the BBC2 network in November and December 1971. It is loosely based on Italian adventurer Giacomo Casanova's...
about the life of Giacomo Casanova
Giacomo Casanova
Giacomo Girolamo Casanova de Seingalt was an Italian adventurer and author from the Republic of Venice. His autobiography, Histoire de ma vie , is regarded as one of the most authentic sources of the customs and norms of European social life during the 18th century...
, Where Adam Stood is a loose adaptation of original source material set within a fictional framework. In Potter on Potter, the author told editor Graham Fuller that he used only a few pages of Father and Son as his starting point, and rejected the resultant play's status as a straight adaptation. Instead, Potter saw the play as part of a loose trilogy exploring an individual's choices (or rather, lack of them) in the face of seemingly omniscient forces; Where Adam Stood was to form the last part, preceded by Double Dare
Double Dare (play)
Double Dare is a television play by Dennis Potter, first broadcast on BBC1 on 6 April 1976 as part of the Play for Today series. The play explores the link between author and viewer, one of Potter's major themes, and is referenced several times in his later work...
and Brimstone and Treacle
Brimstone and Treacle
-Potter on Brimstone and Treacle:In 1978, Potter said:I had written Brimstone and Treacle in difficult personal circumstances. Years of acute psoriatic arthropathy—unpleasantly affecting skin and joints—had not only taken their toll in physical damage but had also, and perhaps inevitably, mediated...
, respectively (both 1976). The BBC's decision not to broadcast Brimstone effectively ended this idea, although Potter would continue to refer to the three as a connected trilogy in interviews and critical essays. Potter would also later tell Fuller that he considered Where Adam Stood to be amongst the "most satisfying" of his plays.
Where Adam Stood, however, was written at a very difficult time for Potter. In 1974, his father died and this, coupled with a severe bout of psoriatic arthropathy, led to Potter developing writer's block
Writer's block
Writer's block is a condition, primarily associated with writing as a profession, in which an author loses the ability to produce new work. The condition varies widely in intensity. It can be trivial, a temporary difficulty in dealing with the task at hand. At the other extreme, some "blocked"...
. Double Dare was a reflection on the problems he was having writing, while Brimstone was written in response to the ravages of his debilitating illness; Where Adam Stood was Potter's reflection on the communication problems he faced in his relationship with his father.
Themes
Where Adam Stood contains none of the non-naturalistic flourishes that have become synonymous with Potter's work, although it does contain a number of familiar tropes he would explore in other pieces. The fallThe Fall of Man
In Christian doctrine, the Fall of Man, or simply the Fall, refers to the transition of the first humans from a state of innocent obedience to God to a state of guilty disobedience to God. In Genesis chapter 2, Adam and Eve live at first with God in a paradise, but the serpent tempts them into...
is represented by Mary Teague's sexual attack on the young Edmund in the woods, which Potter later described as a "physical acknowledgement" that the world is not as innocent or good as Edmund had previously been led to believe. This sequence, which does not feature in Gosse's original book, is one of many that ties into the central theme of Edmund reclaiming himself from his father, who acts as the mouthpiece for an omniscient and unseen God. The boy's final act of using his prayers to deceive his father into allowing him to have the toy sailboat was, Potter explained, "a form of betrayal" and one that was "deeply rooted in [Philip Gosse's] religious language [...] He has observed the boy praying, but because his own faith has been tested he no longer knows what God expects of him anymore."
Historical background
The drama includes a number of episodes derived from scenes described in Edmund Gosse's book. The nearest parallel to the story of the sailing boat is Gosse's description of his childhood prayer to have a "humming top", for which his parents told him was inappropriate to pray. He replied that his father had "said we ought to pray for things we needed, and I needed a humming top a great deal more more than I did the conversion of the heathen or the restitution of Jerusalem to the Jews, two objects of my nightly supplication which left me very cold." An episode in which a visitor is surprised to learn that young Edmund has never heard of Robin HoodRobin Hood
Robin Hood was a heroic outlaw in English folklore. A highly skilled archer and swordsman, he is known for "robbing from the rich and giving to the poor", assisted by a group of fellow outlaws known as his "Merry Men". Traditionally, Robin Hood and his men are depicted wearing Lincoln green clothes....
is derived from a passage in which he states that his mother banned all fictional stories from the house on the grounds that fiction was a form of lies. He writes "I was familiar with humming-birds but had never heard of fairies. Jack the Giant Killer, Rumpelstiltskin and Robin Hood were not of my acquiantance".
Edmund's description of his father's studies towards the publication of Omphalos place it in the context of the debates about Charles Lyell
Charles Lyell
Sir Charles Lyell, 1st Baronet, Kt FRS was a British lawyer and the foremost geologist of his day. He is best known as the author of Principles of Geology, which popularised James Hutton's concepts of uniformitarianism – the idea that the earth was shaped by slow-moving forces still in operation...
's geology, which emphasised that the earth was millions of years old, and recent work by various naturalists including Thomas Vernon Wollaston
Thomas Vernon Wollaston
Thomas Vernon Wollaston was a prominent English entomologist and malacologist, becoming especially known for his studies of Coleoptera inhabiting several North Atlantic archipelagoes. He was well-placed socially. His religious beliefs effectively prevented him from supporting Darwin's theories...
, Joseph Dalton Hooker
Joseph Dalton Hooker
Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker OM, GCSI, CB, MD, FRS was one of the greatest British botanists and explorers of the 19th century. Hooker was a founder of geographical botany, and Charles Darwin's closest friend...
and Alfred Russel Wallace
Alfred Russel Wallace
Alfred Russel Wallace, OM, FRS was a British naturalist, explorer, geographer, anthropologist and biologist...
. In the play, only Darwin's as-yet unpublished work is mentioned. Philip Gosse is visited to secure his support for it. This incident derives from the following passage in Father and Son:
In this period of intellectual ferment, as when a great political revolution is being planned, many possible adherents were confidentially tested with hints and encouraged to reveal their bias in a whisper. It was the notion of Lyell, himself a great mover of men, that before the doctrine of natural selection was given to a world which would be sure to lift up at it a howl of execration, a certain body-guard of sound and experienced naturalists, expert in the description of species, should be privately made aware of its tenour. Among those who were thus initiated, or approached with a view towards possible illumination, was my Father. He was spoken to by Hooker, and later on by Darwin, after meetings of the Royal Society in the summer of 1857.
However Edmund makes it clear that Lyell's geology was the object his father's hatred, not Darwin himself, for whom he had "a profound esteem". In fact Darwin is never criticised in Omphalos, which is subtitled "an attempt to untie the geological knot". He is mentioned approvingly in passing twice, whereas Darwin's tutor Adam Sedgwick
Adam Sedgwick
Adam Sedgwick was one of the founders of modern geology. He proposed the Devonian period of the geological timescale...
is repeatedly attacked. Sedgwick was an old earth creationist who believed that God had miraculously created and then caused the extinction of separate immutable species in sequence over millions of years as a sign of his power. Evolutionary theory is only briefly mentioned when the 1844 evolutionary tract Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation
Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation
Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation is a unique work of speculative natural history published anonymously in England in 1844. It brought together various ideas of stellar evolution with the progressive transmutation of species in an accessible narrative which tied together numerous...
is dismissed because "this writer has hatched a scheme by which the immediate ancestor of Adam was a Chimpanzee and his remote ancestor a Maggot!".
The role of Charles Kingsley
Charles Kingsley
Charles Kingsley was an English priest of the Church of England, university professor, historian and novelist, particularly associated with the West Country and northeast Hampshire.-Life and character:...
in the drama derives from a letter he wrote to Gosse senior, cited by Edmund, in which he stated:
Shall I tell you the truth? It is best. Your book is the first that ever made me doubt, and I fear it will make hundreds do so. Your book tends to prove this - that if we accept the fact of absolute creation, God becomes Deus quidam deceptor [‘God who is sometimes a deceiver’]. I do not mean merely in the case of fossils which pretend to be the bones of dead animals; but in the one single case of your newly created scars on the pandanus trunkPandanusPandanus is a genus of monocots with about 600 known species. They are numerous palmlike dioecious trees and shrubs native of the Old World tropics and subtropics. They are classified in the order Pandanales, family Pandanaceae.-Overview:...
, your newly created Adam's navel, you make God tell a lie. It is not my reason, but my conscience which revolts here ... I cannot ... believe that God has written on the rocks one enormous and superfluous lie for all mankind.
In the play, the use of the expression "survival of the fittest" is attributed to Darwin; in reality it was first coined by Herbert Spencer
Herbert Spencer
Herbert Spencer was an English philosopher, biologist, sociologist, and prominent classical liberal political theorist of the Victorian era....
in his Principals of Biology (1864).
Intertextuality
Although Where Adam Stood is set on the Devonshire coast, the townsfolk appear to speak with Potter's native Forest of DeanForest of Dean
The Forest of Dean is a geographical, historical and cultural region in the western part of the county of Gloucestershire, England. The forest is a roughly triangular plateau bounded by the River Wye to the west and north, the River Severn to the south, and the City of Gloucester to the east.The...
dialect; this is used many times in Potter's original works.
'Mary Teague' appears, in name if not in person, in several Potter plays. In A Beast With Two Backs
A Beast With Two Backs
A Beast With Two Backs is a television play by Dennis Potter, first broadcast on BBC1 in 1968 as part of The Wednesday Play strand.The play is a fictional account of an event that happened in the Forest of Dean in the 1890s when four Frenchmen came over the border from Gloucester with dancing...
(1968) she is a miner's wife, whose husband's infidelity drives the play's narrative. She is also referred to in Cream in My Coffee
Cream in My Coffee
Cream in My Coffee is a television drama by Dennis Potter, broadcast on ITV on 2 November 1980 as the last in a loosely-connected trilogy of plays exploring language and betrayal. A juxtaposition between youth and old age, the play combines a non-linear narrative with the use of popular music to...
(1980), when the curmudgeonly Bernard Wilsher (played by Lionel Jeffries
Lionel Jeffries
Lionel Charles Jeffries was an English actor, screenwriter and film director.-Early life and career:Jeffries attended the Queen Elizabeth Grammar School, Wimborne Minster, Dorset. In 1945, he received a commission in the Oxford and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry...
) reminisces about a 'Mrs Teague' who used to live in his village; describing her as a "mad old woman with a cat".
The biblical passage Edmund attempts to memorise throughout the course of the play is the Epistle of St Paul to the Philippians
Epistle to the Philippians
The Epistle of Paul to the Philippians, usually referred to simply as Philippians, is the eleventh book in the New Testament. Biblical scholars agree that it was written by St. Paul to the church of Philippi, an early center of Christianity in Greece around 62 A.D. Other scholars argue for an...
. Potter had previously used this passage as the centrepiece to his 1972 drama Follow the Yellow Brick Road
Follow the Yellow Brick Road
Follow the Yellow Brick Road is a television play by Dennis Potter, first broadcast in 1972 as part of BBC Two's The Sextet series of eight plays featuring the same six actors. The play is notable for its central theme of popular culture becoming the inheritor of religious scripture, which...
.
Broadcast
The play was broadcast on BBC2 on 21 April 1976. It was not repeated until 2005 as part of BBC FourBBC Four
BBC Four is a British television network operated by the British Broadcasting Corporation and available to digital television viewers on Freeview, IPTV, satellite and cable....
's Potter season, marking the tenth anniversary of his death.
Sources
- Humphrey Carpenter, Dennis Potter: A Biography; 1998
- Graham Fuller (Ed.), Potter on Potter; 1993
- W. Stephen Gilbert, Fight and Kick and Bite: The Life and Work of Dennis Potter; 1995
- Nigel Williams (Ed.) ArenaArena (TV series)Arena is a British television documentary series, made and broadcast by the BBC. It has run since 1 October 1975, and over five hundred episodes have been made. Arena covers all manner of subjects, from profiles of notable people such as Bob Dylan to the Ford Cortina car...
: Potter at the BBC; 2005