Bickering over the value/rating of Dennis Potter's TV will lead nowhere but to a hopelessly outdated auteur approach to his texts. Rosalind Coward has argued that the BBC used to hide behind the towering auteur Potter in order to make herself culturally respectable and to get away with the usual drivel (my paraphrase). TV is collaboration - and this is a commonplace that is once-more substantiated by *The Singing Detective* where a lot of brilliant people turned the Potter script into an excellent series. On the other hand, I can't resist: I think even *Blackeyes* for all its flaws is important, because TV is almost the only place where being self-indulgent has a certain merit. Also, where else can you still shock anyone? In a novel, a film, on the Internet? (Even if the shock aesthetics is on its way out even in TV). Potter should be credited for the mere fact that he was taking risks. Like in Sam Beckett's FAIL FAIL AGAIN FAIL BETTER. I'd much rather watch a great Potter failure than, say, *Christabel*. If you consdier the 1972 *Follow the Yellow Brick Road* it is visually TV stone age, its ideas are, well, locked in a Hoggart-Denys Thompson critique of commercialism, and certainly not very original or thought-through. Still, there is a RISK: a lot of verbal vomit poured over the media, society, the world - and isn't that exactly what they need sometimes? Dr. Eckart Voigts-Virchow Institut fuer Anglistik & Amerikanistik Justus-Liebig-Universitaet Giessen Otto-Behaghel-Str. 10B D-35394 GIESSEN Tel 06 41 - 702 - 55 55 Fax 06 41 - 702 - 38 11 Tel/Priv 0 64 03 - 6 83 82 e-mail: [log in to unmask] ---- To signoff SCREEN-L, e-mail [log in to unmask] and put SIGNOFF SCREEN-L in the message. Problems? Contact [log in to unmask]