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Although best known for the serials PENNIES FROM HEAVEN (1978) and THE SINGING DETECTIVE (1986), British playwright Dennis Potter created a huge and varied body of work that places him among the most important television auteurs of the twentieth century. Emerging from the same fertile production environment that cultivated the early “kitchen-sink realism” of Mike Leigh and Ken Loach, Potter’s early TV plays took a more fractured and elliptical approach to similar socially conscious subject matter, while also developing his consistent themes: arrested development, repressed sexuality, the mundanity of postwar life, and the cruelty of human nature. Often blending fantasy and reality and incorporating musical numbers as the main characters’ only means of escape from the misery of their own existence, these three early, criminally underseen plays show Potter coming into his own as a unique and acerbic talent — and are, in many ways, far more personal and scathing than the better-known work that followed.