Dennis Potter's 'Pennies From Heaven' ,Forest of Dean

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Dennis Potter was born in Berry Hill, Forest of Dean, Gloucestershire. His father, Walter Edward Potter (1906--1975), was a coal miner in this rural mining area between Gloucester and Wales; his mother was Margaret Constance, née Wale (b. 1910). Potter has a sister named June.

Brought up a Protestant he attended the local Salem chapel, and went to Christchurch junior school where, in 1946, he passed the eleven-plus entrance examination to Bell's Grammar School at Coleford. He then went to St. Clement Danes School in London, while the family lived for a time with his maternal grandfather in Hammersmith. During this time the ten year old Potter was sexually abused by his uncle, an experience he would later allude to many times in his writing.[1] Between 1953 and 1955, he did his National Service and learnt Russian at the Joint Services School for Linguists, serving with the Intelligence Corps and subsequently at the War Office.[citation neede

After national service, in 1956, he won a scholarship and went to New College, Oxford to study Politics, Philosophy and Economics, editing the student magazine Isis. He graduated in 1958, after obtaining a second-class degree. A tall, lean young man with red hair, he was described by his economics tutor as a "cross between Jimmy Porter and Keir Hardie".[2] On 10 January 1959 he married Margaret Amy Morgan (1933--1994) at Christchurch parish church.[citation needed] The couple had a son, Robert and two daughters, Jane and Sarah, who was to achieve prominence in the 1980s as an international cricketer.

After Oxford, Potter joined the BBC, initially as a trainee in radio and then television journalism, during which time he worked on Panorama about the closure of coalpits in the Forest of Dean. He did not take to television journalism and left, joining the left-wing newspaper Daily Herald from August 1961 he became a television critic for that paper and for its successor, The Sun in its pre-Murdoch incarnation. However, he soon returned to television, writing sketches for That Was The Week That Was with David Nathan. He also attempted to become a Labour Member of Parliament ( . Potter then embarked on his career as a television playwright, largely after watching the 1963 Granada version of Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace, based on Erwin Piscator's celebrated stage production. Potter had called it "surely the most exciting evening that TV has ever given us"