Potter on Rupert

Dennis Potter was not only the grandson of one of our great drawing heroines Beatrix Potter, but also a wonderfully creative TV playwright. Here are his thoughts on Rupert Murdoch. Fifteen years old but still completely relevant.

Kindly Uncle Rupert

The Holy Switch Board

This will mean nothing unless you know what it means...

Hackney Hospital 1979

Been walking not drinking recently.

And reading.

Iain Sinclair’s ‘Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire’. I’m a long-time Sinclair fan.
But this one is particularly redolent for me. Long-forgotten names and places rise from these pages like an evening mist. 1970’s Alternative London. My first proper job, between art schools, was at Hackney Hospital on Homerton High Street. Paid to paint life-size illustrations of the Whitechapel Waste for the walls of the London Hospital. It’s a complicated story and involves the Elephant Man and anarchist art squats in Murder Street and it’s something to go into at greater depth at a later point. In the meantime, here’s me brooding on a requisitioned old scooter that I smuggled up into one of the deserted floors of the block we were given as a ‘studio’. I had a vague notion of restoring it but it never happened...