Through the work of the late television playwright Dennis Potter, this essay sets out to examine the relationship between writer and medium. Questioning the extent to which the various media influence the writing process in terms of both political economy and technological restraints, the work’s principal focus — television — is compared with other media including printed texts. The essay concludes with an assessment of Potter’s skill in using his chosen medium to articulate his own ‘individual voice’.
The role of a medium is seen within reader-response criticism (and, I will argue, as a general supposition) as being to provide a ‘window’ through which an author’s perception may be viewed. This perception might take the form of the creation of fictive worlds, the description of actual ones or, as with this essay, the expression of abstract academic theses. The medium itself, it is supposed, thus becomes transparent within the cognitive processes of both writer and reader of a text. Elizabeth Freund (1987) describes this phenomenon:
Until an act of human intervention takes place to release it from its mute materiality, the book is an inert object. […] A book requires a reading consciousness for its realisation as a work. Upon being read, the ‘object’ disappears into a new existence in the reader’s ‘innermost self’ where its material reality ceases to exist and it becomes a mental entity (image, idea, word), an intention or ‘subjectified’ object which is the transparent consciousness of another.[1]
Freund describes Georges Poulet’s assertion that when a reader is immersed in a text, he or she becomes lost in the imaginative world of that text. The book before him or her together with the room in which he or she is reading it vanishing beneath the work’s illusion. The same is true of the writer composing a work — in The Singing Detective[2] Dennis Potter recalls his experience of suffering from the skin disease psoriasis, earlier described in Waiting for the Boat:
I was in a bed at the London Hospital, unable to move much else besides my left arm and maybe my penis, in an occasional erection which imperiously seemed to take no account of my collapsed hands, caked and cracked skin and feverishly swollen joints.[3]
Philip Marlow, the crime fiction writer central to The Singing Detective, suffers the same dilemma. While having his skin greased by the attractive Nurse Mills, he mentally struggles to prevent himself ejaculating when she lifts his penis in order to complete the greasing, seeking refuge in his writing:
MARLOW: (Thinks) The Court page. Jimmy Savile OBE. Wimbledon fortnight. No good — it’s no good — Ludovic Kennedy, no, no, Archer, not a penny more whatisname Archer no Geoffrey Howe no a sheep flock of sheep colour supplement special offer oh — oh — (Gasp of pleasure) work! (Gasp.) Think! Think! (Gasp.) The story — The story!
And he is released into the cheap paperback […][4]
The concept of a transparent medium need not only be applied to printed texts. An audience for a cinema film, stage play or television or radio drama might become equally engaged by what is unravelling before them, forgetting again both their surroundings and the technology which carries the text. It is worthwhile noting that a book is as much a media ‘technology’ as a television set — both are used as carriers of texts.
With the reader-response theories of the likes of Freund and Poulet, the medium is dissolved as the text it carries is realised by the reader. Marshall McLuhan[5] conversely argues that media technology interposes essentially between text and audience because it is primarily the medium with which they are involved. In his phrase ‘the medium is the message’ McLuhan suggests that the content of broadcasts is secondary to the activity of consuming the technology because media consumers are illiterate in terms of this technology:
Our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot. For the “content” of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to detract the watchdog of the mind. The effect of the medium is made strong and intense just because it is given another medium as “content.” The content of a movie is a novel or a play or an opera. The effect of a movie form is not related to its program content. The “content” of writing or print is speech, but the reader is almost entirely unaware either of print or of speech.[6]
McLuhan compares electronic media technology with electric light. Electric light allows us to be involved in activities which we would be unable to perform without this technology. Until electric lights are used to convey a further medium — such as the text on the electronic advertisements in Piccadilly Circus — we do not consider them to be a medium themselves. This is because, McLuhan argues, electric lights have no perceived “content”, they simply provide light for whatever we wish to achieve by them. Activities carried out by electric light might however be viewed as their “content” and for this they act as a medium.
Electric lighting therefore allows us to project ourselves both temporally and spatially as does television. Since, however, we do not perceive the activities we carry out by electric light to be their “content”, we do not attach the same value judgments to this technology as we do to television. ‘It is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot’ because the ‘technological idiot’ does not apply the same criterion to other technologies. The ‘technological idiot’, posits McLuhan, would not say of electric lights ‘it is how they are used that counts’, even though it is equally possible to conduct atrocities by electric light as it is to carry out benign or benevolent acts. The medium, therefore, is the message, because the content is only possible through the medium and thus the medium must be supreme. To ignore this, says McLuhan, is folly:
This is like the voice of the literate man, floundering in a milieu of ads, who boasts, “Personally, I pay no attention to ads.” […] The effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinions or concepts, but alter sense ratios or patterns of perception steadily and without any resistance. The serious artist is the only person able to encounter technology with impunity, just because he is an expert aware of the changes in sense perception.[7]
The television writer as ‘serious artist’ must not therefore fall into the trap of believing that his or her chosen medium is entirely transparent and inconsequential in itself. He or she is not linking minds with the audience and transmitting directly and completely his or her original thoughts. The text, as Freund states, is subjectified and entirely open to interpretation. This subjectification takes places originally in the author’s translation of his or her ideas into the medium of language in the form of a script, and thence into the further medium of a television programme — both, says McLuhan, interpose essentially. Potter comments that:
The worst thing about television, perhaps, is the way that so many aspects of its administration, its technology, its expensiveness and its method of distribution conspire together (rarely consciously, of course, and yet seldom with genuine innocence) to diminish or threaten or drown out or even stop the mouth of that ‘individual voice’ which all even half-way creative writing must aspire to articulate.[8]
McLuhan concurs with this, remarking that Shakespeare might have been commenting on television when he wrote in Romeo and Juliet:
But soft! What light through yonder window breaks?
It speaks, and yet says nothing.[9]
Potter in his James MacTaggart Memorial Lecture to the Edinburgh Film Festival in 1993 further stated that it is an act of delusion for both author and audience to believe that television’s metaphorical ‘window’ can be looked through rather than looked at:
Television could scarcely resist calling itself ‘a window on the world’, as it did in its early days, even using the subtitle on Panorama. But windows have frames, and the frames are part of a structure that has already been built. I have said, many years ago, that on the television screen it is often when the set is switched off that it picks up a direct or true reflection of its viewers, subdued into a glimmer on its dull grey tube. When the set is on, alive with images, the window analogy persists because, away from the expensive brilliance and often genuine sophistication of title sequences, logos and the commercials, most of television, most TV journalists, most of its decidedly over-long news programmes, all of its proliferating soaps, most of its dramas, pretend or assume or wish that the picture in the frame — adjusted for a laugh, a snigger, a gasp or a tear — is showing us things as they really are.[10]
The delusion that the television set is a gateway to other worlds through which we might vicariously participate in the experience of others is one, says Potter, upheld by many producers of television programmes in the mistaken belief that they can provide such a portal. If McLuhan’s argument that the dominant medium is the message, we might see that the ‘technological idiots’ involved in the production of television programmes operate via an even more dominant medium — money.
The aspiring television writer attempts to enter an industrial marketplace to which there is very restricted access. A writer choosing to work in this medium must accept that he or she faces an uphill struggle if they wish to remain faithful to their original vision of what form their television writing should take — at least if they are to have their work produced. In this year’s Huw Wheldon Memorial Lecture the television dramatist Andrew Davies[11] suggests that new writers are required to compromise their work to cater for what is seen as mass popular taste in order to sell their scripts to an industry seeking to produce near-copies of what has already proven popular.
This has recently been evident within mainstream film, Hollywood seizing upon successful nineteen-sixties television programmes such as The Beverly Hillbillies[12], Maverick[13] and The Flintstones[14] for cinematic remakes because, as David Marc (1994) puts it:
[…] though they have no on-screen tales to sell, these films do possess a commodity that is far more prized in the contemporary market: built-in public familiarity, or what television executives call the “f-score”. The property comes fully equipped with a track record — translatable into charts, graphs and vinyl-bound reports that ‘prove’ a proposed movie’s market value — which is an invaluable asset for producers seeking finance and much more convincing than the fact that you find a comedy funny or a mystery gripping.[15]
Davies recalls that when he began writing for television during the nineteen-sixties there was a far greater opportunity for himself and his contemporaries (including Potter) to have screenplays produced. BBC television series such as Play for Today[16] and The Wednesday Play[17] allowed new scriptwriters to find their ‘individual voice’ through the single drama. Davies blames the demise of this form for what he sees as the low quality of contemporary work. The title of his lecture — Prima Donnas and Job Lots — is derived from his quality division of scriptwriters. He views those screenwriters who insist on the integrity of their original work as ‘prima donnas’ carrying the torch for quality drama broadcasting, whilst those who turn out scripts for tried and tested serials such as Casualty[18], The Bill[19] and EastEnders[20] are ‘job lots’, endlessly regurgitating hackneyed formulas and reducing TV drama to a lugubrious mass.
Both Davies and Potter are advocates of a non-naturalistic approach to the creation of television programmes. Although EastEnders is cited by Davies as a potential spawning ground for ‘job lots’, he included within his lecture a clip of the programme featuring the characters Angie and Den Watts. These characters, he argued, were entirely unlike ‘real life’, but they worked through the medium of television to convey essential ‘truths’ about human existence. The assumption that the realist form, Davies continued, was financially more bankable than an alternative which did not feel obliged to justify itself in mundane credibility was a misconception — audiences were both flexible and intelligent enough to consume more innovative work. Furthermore, he contended, advertisers were beginning to realise this.
Potter points out that the realist form is adhered to not only by television executives attempting to maximise audiences, but also by academics wishing to deride the medium. In Waiting for the Boat he quotes an unnamed academic:[21]
‘Television manufactures people in its own technological image […] Its characters are creatures who could exist only on television: they are residents of the box whose faces are screens. A later chapter, commenting on television’s detectives and private eyes, will contend that, because television is so two-dimensionally bland, favouring amiable anonymity, the only way it can ensure a character’s individuality is to burden him with a tic, deface him with a quirk — Kojak’s lollipop, Columbo’s scruffy raincoat, Rockford’s beaten-up trailer.'[22]
This, says Potter, is the anonymous academic, ‘taking the poodle of his prejudices for a little walk’, going on to remark that little has been written about television ‘which does not betray smirking condescension or a rather less culpable unease.’ McLuhan’s work could be taken to reveal this kind of discomfort with the medium, his phrase ‘the medium is the message’ reducing television viewers to ‘technological idiots’ who are unaware of the insidious effects of the medium, duped into undiscriminating and undiscerning consumption of televisual texts.
Potter would not dismiss McLuhan outright, but moderate his hypothesis. While accepting that the television scriptwriter is essentially influenced by the medium — by ‘its administration, its technology, its expensiveness and its method of distribution’ — he believed in the possibilities for communication it has to offer. McLuhan excepts ‘serious artists’ from the ‘technological idiot’ bracket because they maintain awareness of these strong influences. Potter allows that the medium can produce inferior texts and writers, saying that, ‘to trundle the adjective noun Television in front of the noble old word Playwright is not entirely dissimilar to placing “processed” right next to “cheese”‘ (Potter (1984), p.15), but it was principally his concern that the medium should not be denigrated in favour of others, particularly literature, as revealed in a 1987 interview with Alan Yentob:
ALAN YENTOB: You could have written for the theatre, you could have written novels, but you didn’t; you chose to write for television. Why did you decide that?
DENNIS POTTER: I had the… yearning, maybe — I don’t know what is the right word for there to be a possibility at least of a common culture. […] but it was really something else like being in primary school again and making everything all right… all sorts and conditions of human being could share the same experiences, do share the same experiences, and that because of the tyranny and treachery of words, which are dependent upon education, which in itself is dependent upon class in England — that one of the ways of jumping over the hierarchies of the print culture was television, because anyone or everyone could see it.[23]
Television was therefore essential in defining Potter as a playwright or, conversely, how Potter defined his work. His choice of television was made through his belief that it was an egalitarian way in which to disseminate information and experience, but television also demands a way of writing which is distinct from theatre, radio or cinema which Potter mastered. Thus far we have established how television’s industrial structures impose themselves upon the writer, in the concluding part of this essay we will examine how its technology determines how scripts are written — the language of television.
The nature of writing for the electronic media is largely determined by their physical characteristics. Radio, for example, is a sound-only medium and scripts must be constructed in line with these limitations, using sound to convey all of its messages. Cinema, conversely, makes large, high resolution images available to the writer and the script can be conveyed almost entirely visually.
Television is a more complex blend of sound and image, sound playing a more essential role than in cinema. John Ellis draws the following distinctions between cinema and television:
The role played by sound stems from the fact that it radiates in all directions, whereas view of the TV image is sometimes restricted. Direct eye contact is needed with the TV screen. Sound can be heard when the screen cannot be seen. So sound is used to ensure a certain level of attention, to drag viewers back to looking at the set. […] Sound holds attention more consistently than image, and provides a continuity that holds across momentary lapses of attention. The result is a slightly different balance between sound and image from that which is characteristic of cinema. Cinema is guaranteed a centred viewer by the physical arrangement of cinema seats and customs of film viewing. Sound therefore follows the image or diverges from it. The image is the central reference in cinema. But for TV, sound has a more centrally defining role.[24]
Although the defining characteristics of the various electronic media are largely self-evident, there is a danger that these traits will be applied too rigidly by writers. This is particularly embodied in the perspective which views radio as a ‘blind’ medium. In Icon or symbol: the writer and the ‘medium’ Jonathan Raban[25] asserts that considering radio plays as exponents of that ‘medium’ is as relevant as considering novels as examples of the printed word. If the logic of the argument which portrays radio as a ‘blind’ medium is extended, does it follow that printed text is both ‘blind’ and ‘deaf’ since a reader can neither literally hear nor see the characters and events portrayed?
Since, as McLuhan indicates, each medium has another medium as its content, the writer can resort to the dynamics of the content medium to convey his or her messages. Thus the writer of radio drama has speech, music and sound effects at his or her disposal and can use a blend of these to convey his or her script. The assumption that the listener is ‘blind’ can lead, as William Ash[26] points out, to clumsy radio scripts full of self-conscious descriptiveness such as those parodied by Timothy West’s radio play, This Gun I Hold in My Right Hand is Loaded.
Cinema and television are also discrete entities in terms of their ‘language’. The two media are often compared because it is possible to show cinema films on television, but a writer should bear in mind that they speak to audiences in different ways. Ellis goes on to point out that a cinema close-up, for example, has an entirely different meaning to one on television because of the scale of the image — an image of an actor’s face on a cinema screen is several feet high and therefore will have more dramatic impact than a similar image on a television screen which will roughly equate to its actual size. Cinema therefore uses fewer close-ups than television.
As indicated in the above quotation, the cinema audience’s experience of the medium is distinct from that of the television audience in part, as above, because of the two media’s physical characteristics, but also because their textual content is different. Raymond Williams[27] points out that television is made up of a number of separate texts — which he terms ‘segments’ — which merge together in a ‘flow’, together forming our experience of ‘watching television’. Cinema, conversely, is a single text (discounting advertising and trailers), establishing itself in the audience’s minds as a single experience rather than as part and parcel of an evening’s viewing.
The Singing Detective masters the unique qualities of television, demanding its audience’s attention in much the same way as a cinema film — the plot too complex to be glanced at only intermittently and too rooted in visual content to be conveyed largely by sound — but also bringing a quality most often associated with radio to the small screen.
Both Andrew Crisell[28] and William Ash concur that radio has a unique ability amongst the electronic media to place the listener within the minds of characters and this quality, says Crisell, enables radio drama to pose abstract and ontological questions. Plays with a metaphysical setting may thus be most easily portrayed on radio.
Since Potter relates the stories in The Singing Detective from Marlow’s point of view, we are always within this character’s mind. As Marlow slips into drug-induced stupors, we are taken back to his childhood in the Forest of Dean; as he recalls his paperback novel to forget his suffering (as in the extract given earlier), we are transported into this story; and the surreal workings of Marlow’s mind are shown as patients in his hospital ward mouth the lyrics of songs the fictional detective croons, drawing the threads of the story into one.
Potter’s dislike of the ‘window’ perspective is much in evidence. The audience is not led to believe that the camera could have observed the events portrayed within The Singing Detective as a ‘bystander’, but that the perspective is an extension of Potter’s imagination. Although Potter shuns such devices as having actors address the audience as themselves, we are never allowed to forget that the action takes place within the mind of a writer. Marlow imagines that his wife has stolen his screenplay and, with her lover, plans to plagiarise his work. He mentally dramatises their meetings:
Back in the ward, Marlow, left alone, allows his hostility to break surface again in sour bubbles of bad ‘writing’ in which Nicola and Binney meet in the lobby.
BINNEY: You did it question mark.
NICOLA: I did it exclamation mark.
BINNEY: He signed question mark.
NICOLA: He signed exclamation mark.
BINNEY: Oh comma aren’t you the clever one dash exclamation mark.[29]
Through its constant reminder that Marlow is the ‘author’ of all the stories in The Singing Detective, the work forces us to question whether Marlow’s voice is, in fact, Potter’s own. Andrew Davies in his Huw Wheldon Memorial Lecture comments that part of Potter’s ability was to allow his audience to ‘wholly know’ him as an author, but Potter denies that there is this level of connection:
You know when the novelist says I, he doesn’t mean I, and yet you want him to mean I, and I’ve used for example in The Singing Detective, I used the Forest of Dean, I used the physical circumstances of psoriasis arthropathy […] and it seemed so personal then, but I often do that. It isn’t. You know the wife thing? The whole inner structure of that man is different to me.[30]
Although Potter did not believe in the ‘window’ model of television anymore than McLuhan, unlike McLuhan his answer to the question, ‘What light through yonder window breaks?’ was not ‘It speaks and yet says nothing’, or at least not always. He believed that television could and should be used to reach the audience at a fundamental level:
‘Only connect,’ said E M Forster […] what a good word: connect. The verb which far better than the merely technical transmit is, if not actually, certainly what should be the defining activity of all television…[31]
In writing this essay I have experienced some ambivalence with McLuhan’s assertion that ‘the medium is the message’ since it seems to be an argument against writing. If ‘the medium is the message’, I hypothesise, nothing can be said through a medium but each medium must give itself opaquely up as a message within itself. Using this hypothesis it would seem that the various media exist autonomously and select writers for themselves rather than writers selecting them.
What I hope to have shown, however, is that for writers to treat the medium through which they communicate as transparent is folly. Since the media influence the content and availability of a writer’s work, the elusive ‘individual voice’ can only be achieved through awareness of the myriad influences of a chosen medium, this awareness dividing the ‘serious artist’ from the ‘technological idiot’.
Notes and references