MELVYN BRAGG: Why do you think you got so much resistance in Brimstone and Treacle?

DENNIS POTTER: It’s a very complicated story, but if I could put in essence what I saw I was trying to do – it’s, in a way it’s a simple flip-over of an orthodox, of an ordinary sentimental religiose, rather than religious, parable, in that there is an afflicted house – variously afflicted, but in particular with a crippled, seemingly mindless, struck girl, young girl. And there is a visitor, and the visitor brings her to life and makes her speak. Now, if that visitor were an angel, then all you would have is sanctimoniousness, you would learn nothing about anything, and I chose, in my head – and this is how it began, this is why I’m talking this way – it began in my head as like that ... What if it were the devil? Instead of making that easy distinction which, on the whole, only the blasphemous make ... non-religious people make this distinction very easily, between so-called good and so-called evil, when of course they are interrelated, and one is defined in terms of the other, and one can’t exist without the other, which is why ... Satan was an angel, you know ... and all art of any kind has attempted to deal with this, has had to deal with the dualism of it. So instead of the angel coming and rescuing the cripple and the dumb and the afflicted, I had the devil do it. The evil act can lead to good consequences; a good act can lead to evil consequences. This is often the case, and it is ... it is incomprehensible. It is as though, you know, the rain falls on the just and upon the unjust. It is so. Now, it appeared disgusting because it was a devil, and because it was a rape, or the beginnings of a rape, that made her cry out; and interestingly, the cry out was actually an accusation against her father. That complexity is, as I say, simply a reversal of what would have been sanctimonious and sentimental. It was that that offended and afflicted people.

I remember Alastair Milne, Director of Programmes for television at the time, saying, in a letter to me, something like, ‘brilliantly made and written, so and so ... but nauseating’ – ‘nauseating, diabolical’, exactly the right word. It was diabolical. It was meant to be. Nauseating, not in the sense that he meant, but nauseating in the sense of making you think about those forces, those circumstances, those afflictions, and the way we manipulate the words good and bad. That to me is what it was about.

MB: It did, it did ... it’s strange that that should be banned, isn’t it, in a way? Did you want to pursue it?

DP: Now, Mrs Whitehouse wanted me prosecuted for blasphemy after Son of Man about Jesus, because my Jesus was, if you like, a Forest of Dean Jesus, with a view of the wood and the cross before his crucifixion, like knowing that it was good timber, and then the uses that man, cruel man, puts timber ... instead of making tables and chairs and useful things, they kill other men with it – and because he was that sort of Jesus, and there are millions of Jesuses – obviously, and mine was just one of them – but there was a row in the Australian Parliament about it, you know, things like that, and I think, well, if people get so conditioned that they’ll watch these endless pappy series without any ... there’s violence every twenty or thirty seconds – whatever the audience rating system demands – there’s sex used just like that, bang ... there are constant sanctimonious references to God or the good, you know ... If you quest, if you try and make people see the real, real, real use of these words, they get hopping mad sometimes, but so be it. But that’s what television’s for too.

[Seeing the Blossom, pp.21-22.]