‘The quality of the writing was clear as a bell’: the

The trailblazing dramatist, who died 30 years ago today, was celebrated for his creativity, but also had work banned by the BBC. His peers discuss his legacy – and that extraordinary final interview

On the morning of 15 March 1994, the 58-year-old TV dramatist Dennis Potter arrived at South Bank Studios in London, to give his extraordinary final public interview to Melvyn Bragg. A month before, Potter – a television auteur and the creator of The Singing Detective and Pennies from Heaven among dozens of other television plays, series and feature films – had been diagnosed with terminal cancer of the pancreas and liver.

No one knew how long the interview would last. In the almost hour-long package, broadcast a few days later on Channel 4, Potter looked perilously thin and exhausted, his body swamped by a baggy beige suit. The table between him and Bragg was covered with a few necessary objects: ashtray, coffee cup, champagne glass, as well as a beaker of liquid morphine. Despite the grim prognosis – he had been given just a few months to live – Potter was writing his latest, and last, scripts, the interconnected series Karaoke and Cold Lazarus, unique in later being co-produced by Channel 4 and the BBC. “It keeps me going,” he explained to Bragg. “There would be no point in remaining if I didn’t [write].”