It’s a moving interview to watch, but I found at the time of viewing it that it was almost too much to take in. As much as you’re listening to what he’s saying and engaging with it, you’re also looking at a very ill person and your thoughts are also taken up with that – the way he looks, and the obvious pain he’s in. It’s an overwhelming experience, and so it’s helpful to read Melvyn Bragg’s thoughts on the interview that serves as the book’s introduction. Bragg conducted the interview, and describes how, afterwards, he walked out into the English rain and looked over the Thames Embankment, holding back tears. This transcript gives you a good amount to think about, not least because twenty years have passed and you have to wonder whether things have changed for the better, in terms of television and in terms of society. That extra level of meaning, and the weird sense of almost-nostalgia that accompanies it, for a time when someone like Dennis Potter would be making incredibly challenging television, is a fitting addendum to the canon of the writer of such works as Blue Remembered Hills and Pennies From Heaven. Although I’m not sure he would argue that life is worse, or better, now. At one point he describes how he continually covered the same ground in his works, and didn’t ever ascribe to the idea that he was looking back fondly at the past, either generally or in regards to his own childhood. He says instead that it is only easier to look at a society more objectively through the lens of time, and therefore to recognise truths about the present. Seeing The Blossom also includes the text of the speech Dennis Potter gave at the James MacTaggart Memorial Lecture at the Edinburgh Film Festival in 1993, and the transcript of an interview he gave to Alan Yentob in 1987. The last part of the book reprints a short story, Last Pearls, that explores Potter’s feelings about the drive to write, and the lack of satisfaction it offers. Can anything, even the very last words in a writing career, really say what needs to be said? I think few books about the process of writing capture what a truly frustrating career it is, and how it never sates the need to be heard, but only makes it stronger. Here those emotions are front and centre, which makes it important stuff for those in the creative industries. If you’d like to comment on this month’s non-fiction choice then we’d love to read it. At the beginning of June Kaci will be writing about Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor. Follow our Twitter feed for faster news and bad jokes right here. And be our Facebook chum here.
