A plea. If you are going to share one piece of television drama with your English class, let it be this! Do your kids a favour, buy this DVD now.
Blue Remembered Hills remains one of Dennis Potter’s best-known plays, and is the one that is most often still produced on the stage, even though it was originally written for television. It is a story about childhood, the “land of lost content” of Housman’s verses and has obvious appeal to modern English students.
In his introduction to the play Potter acknowledges that “compared with most of the plays I have written ... it is by far the simplest in both form and content.”
It has certainly always gone down well in class. One student I showed the DVD to recently wrote:
“I found it simple, but I must admit I found its content to be very disturbing. The play is set in the year 1943, in the West Country and Britain is at war but I only picked these clues up slowly as we went through the play in class. I must admit that it made me laugh when I saw children were played by adults. It was a bit of a shock to see them act this way but I soon became used to it. Dennis Potter certainly grabbed my attention by using such an unusual technique.”
Potter cleverly reacted to the words of A. E. Housman who suggested childhood was a blissful experience.
Potter shows the bitter side of being young. This...
