He was born in the Forest of Dean in 1935, passed his Eleven Plus and went to grammar school on a scholarship. On completing National Service he went to Oxford to read Politics, Philosophy and Economics, where he became president of the Labour Club. After university, Potter went to the BBC and published his first book - The Glittering Coffin - a treatise on contemporary England, around 1961 also making a documentary - Between Two Rivers - a scathing assault on the Berry Hill community of his youth. There was a brief and unsuccessful flirtation with standing as a prospective Labour MP, during which time he became greatly disillusioned with formal politics ("I was probably the only candidate who didn’t vote for his own party") and ultimately the young Dennis Potter, then a twenty-six-year-old on the Daily Herald, began his fiction writing career in earnest as a kickback against the illness that regularly debilitates him for three-month periods two or three times a year: "either you give in, or you survive and create something out of this bomb-site which you’ve become."

Since his 1965 debut The Confidence Course, there have been a steady stream of benchmark single plays for television - Stand Up, Nigel Barton, and Vote, Vote, Vote for Nigel Barton (both 1965), A Beast With Two Backs (1968), Son of Man (1969), Joe’s Ark (1974), Blue Remembered Hills (1979) - and the landmark series of ‘Plays With Songs’ - Pennies from Heaven (1978), The Singing Detective (1986) (for many, the single greatest achievement of television drama), and Lipstick on Your Collar (1993). During this period Potter has never been afraid to try other things, from scripting a string of movies with mixed success - the intriguing Track 29 (with the great Nic Roeg), the grotesque Gorky Park, and the near-triumphant Dreamchild (a partial fantasy re-reading on Alice and Lewis Carroll) - adapting other books to television - Tender is the Night, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Christabel - to some rather willfully oblique, sterile novels ("I think the novel is almost dead"), and a couple of critically mauled stabs at direction.

And it is in the latter case where, inevitably, the bulk of this book lies, Potter and controversy having been close bed-fellows for many years. Not that he will have much truck with the self-appointed moralists that would clean-up the airwaves, and more precisely, clean Dennis Potter off them. But elsewhere he will speak candidly of the controversy that kept the explosive TV play Brimstone and Treacle (1976) - wherein, climatically, a devil rapes a catatonic girl back to life - effectively unseen until 1987. In the meantime it was filmed with Sting in the lead and was, "definitely less successful, as often happens." He also tells of the moment where he realised the bastardised Steve Martin star-vehicle film of Pennies (for which the writer was Oscar-nominated) was doomed, the Americans seemingly unable to appreciate the piece not being a musical. (A script for The Singing Detective, to which the names of Dustin Hoffman and David Cronenberg have been attached at various times, has been nailed down so, "that it won’t allow that kind of mistake to be made.")

But Potter is at his most intriguing when discussing the directing projects, his maze-like, almost opaque feature, Secret Friends (1992) and in particular the ill-fated four part TV drama Blackeyes (adapted from his own novel) that effectively destroyed his creative credibility for almost four years and garnered vitriolic notices even from his usual apologists. His highly complex, layered series attempting to expose the objectification and exploitation of women by the media, was rounded upon and unfairly accused of sexism and misogyny in its own right, much to the writer-director’s chagrin and genuine confusion - "If you come up with English working-class male ideas about women, then traces of (misogyny) - no, more than traces - a lot of that is going to cling to you for a long time." His spirited defence and explanation will, sadly, go unnoticed by those who know him simply now as the tabloid-’Dirty’ Den, and killed the proposed feature reading of the work, but Potter is nothing if not conscious of his own faults - "I did fail," he says. "If there’s such universal rejection and opposition and incomprehension then it’s extremely likely that it was either badly written, or badly done, or both."

As with previous books in this valuable Faber series (those on Scorsese, Cronenberg and Schrader are already required reading) this is made up of collected interviews with the editor over an extended period, and structured, other than biographical information and comment, as question and answer allowing the subject to expand upon their body of work undiluted, free from editorialising. It takes a certain kind of artist for this to work successfully. In Dennis Potter it finds a consistently fascinating, self-critical, humorous and erudite one, the man, like the work, being complex and maybe contradictory, but never less than challenging.

This book comes at the same time as his Lipstick on Your Collar, the third of the trilogy of ‘Plays with Songs’, that signals a renaissance in his work and a return to television once again. But then that, as this book makes clear, is the point. Potter sincerely believes, for all the abuse and denunciation, in the ability of television - particularly British television - to transcend the notion of mass entertainment and push at classlessness ("jumping over the hierarchies") and the limits of artistic validity on mass scale. In that, he is not simply our greatest, most unique television writer, but one of the finest in any field.