Dennis Potter on the experience of watching television

[mfk1664]

An astonishing intellect.

[MrShempenman]

Can any great person upload 'Arena: Potter on TV'? How good would that be?

[piynubbunyip]

"Selling all of you to all of you," sounds like Facebook to me.

[DougPatton1]

Dennis, some of us non-Tory boyz n gals knew wot they woz selling back in '79 thru the Grantham Hag/beast-of-greed's 19Haties - ongoing. "Selling Souls, Mining Minds". The vile Hag asset-stripped Britain and she should be in the Tower not the Lords !

[cofpaddy]

Dennis Potter, frightenly intelligent.

[charleypatton1928]

@cofpaddy your right - hes frighteningley intelligint

[SouthbankSteve]

And how do you answer Mr Yentob? You are here Alan and Dennis is not

[godhelpme2009]

what he's talking about is also the psychological mechanism that is behind addiction.

So like all pushers generating addiction is priority number one. After the addiction is in place your work is done. You can sell them anything. The addict will take a chance  on anything that promises to satisfy. The addiction to You Tube & the web in general rides on the same illusion of some satisfaction that is offered at the next "click".

[SouthbankSteve]

"And one day we will find out what it is". It is Potter who shapes my life and who I miss from British TV

[flyhayable]

so Articulate, so SImple, so Sad

[videoclog]

I wonder where Mr Potter got all this knowledge from.

[avidalocan]

When I started learning German from the early 1900s I thought it was like everything else I'd ever encountered at the time - no-one knows what it really is, no-one cares, and you aren't any the happier for picking up pieces of it, much less the whole lot. Then I realised that they actually were selling something: human fulfillment - what we want. We don't get that now because it's too scary. We are told that to get it we have to spend and spend, but it never ultimately arrives. They lie to us.

[Art4Noise]

If you sell fulfullment, you've made a one time profit. But you can sell the promise of fulfilment endlessly.

And it helps if the nature of fulfilment remains undefined.

[intermender]

well said. i agree and profit is definently the key word.

[avidalocan]

So why doesn't this TV culture want to tell us what it is? Why does it have to remain a secret? Could it be that they know we don't want to know?

The best things to buy are those things you have a good idea about what you are buying, not mysterious and vague things.

[SilverBuddha]

Very perceptive. He sounds like a Marxist, though, or at least like Baudrillard. The fact that it's hard to put into words exactly what it is we're consuming("what they're selling") is very telling.

[ELGROOVER]

"......they don't know what it is they're selling ; the only object is to keep in the game, which is to keep...selling...something and one day we're going to find out what it is."

Yup...our future, our freedom, our humanity, our souls. Lies have never been so cheap or costly, everything must go...

[AdrienneO]

Such a lovely and interesting mind.

I've never seen him interviewed before. Great posting.

I once saw a slogan in an art gallery - alas I forget the artist - which said: "with television it is the consumer that is consumed".

And actually, for a comemrcial television station this is literally true, because the "product" is *not* the programming, the product is the audience, and the advertisers are the customers, not the viewers.

[mazyar]

Mr Potter already back in the mid 80's was warning us about the pernicious and insidious ways advertising culture was and still is poisoning and manipulating the populous.

It has only gotten worst and more insidious.

[wigggo]

RIP. Death to Rupert.

[GibbletsMcGinty]

and a slow painful one too

[flymogram]

hear hear!

[DAHMF]

you know he had a point in what he was saying thank you for posting this i love dennis potter.

[herefordmsv]

Excellent thanks for posting this. I have some dennis potter stuff too.