The Life and Work of Dennis Potter

British dramatist Dennis Potter (1935-1994) is best known in the U.S. for the movie Pennies from Heaven and his television series The Singing Detective, both dreamlike accounts of romantic characters caught in a complex of irony and frustration. Gilbert, a TV producer and journalist, follows the playwright's life from his childhood in the Forest of Dean, on England's Welsh border, through his Oxford days to the BBC and ITV, Britain's independent channel, which together produced more than two dozen Potter teleplays before the dramatist's death from cancer. Though tortured by psoriatic arthropathy--a painful, hereditary arthritis combined with psoriasis--Potter wrote prolifically, turning out numerous reviews, articles and two novels, in addition to his teledramas. Gilbert points out Potter's idiosyncrasies--the use of musical dialogue, characters who address the audience directly, fascination with bodily functions and a self-admitted difficulty in portraying women--but does not propose any overall theory as to what motivated Potter. Disappointingly, this fact-jammed work is more a dense, annotated chronology of Potter's work than a biography. Gilbert was handicapped, however, by the refusal of Potter's estate to cooperate with him. Other than for Potter's mother and sister, no family members and only a few friends agreed to be interviewed. Photos. (Aug.)