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Dennis Potter was born and brought up in the Forest of Dean- a 'strange and beautiful place', as he described it in the last interview before his death, 'rather ugly villages in beautiful landscape, a heart- shaped place between two rivers, somehow slightly cut off from the rest of England... with a people as warm as anywhere else, but they seemed warmer to me.' It was a childhood which informed all his television work, from his first documentary to such classic dramas as The Singing Detective.The Changing Forest, first published in 1962, is Potter's deeply personal study of that small area- its people, traditions, ceremonies and institutions- at a time of profound cultural and social change in the late 1950s and early '60s. With extraordinary precision and feeling he describes the fabric of a world whose old ways are yielding to the habits altering; expectations growing; work, leisure, language itself changing under the impact of the new television, of commercial jingles and the early Elvis. And, with powerful sympathy and wit, he asks whether the gains of modernity have, for the individuals and society he so marvellously evokes, been worth the loss.Part autobiography of one of this century's greatest writers, part elegy for a vanishing way of life, part testament to the abiding humanity that underlies all Potter's work, this exquisite, passionate and brillinat book is a classic of its kind.
Twenty years after Potter's death, and with his own reputation and ouevre receding somewhat, the repeat of the radio serialisation of the "Changing Forest", prompted me to read this book, which in its turn was a spin off of a short documentary film in which the young Potter, a BBC journalist and prospective Labour politician, gives an exile's eye view of the Forest of Dean as the (possibly not so) swinging sixties gathered pace.Potter's perceptive, sometimes emotional, sometimes affectionate, sometimes pessimistic tour, actually foretells the wider 1980s decline of the UK's mining and heavy industry and consequent breakup of traditional working class values and communities. His ambivalence to the ways of the Forest and its people, clearly under attack from harsher realities and opportunities, reflect his own inner conflict as he himself moved away. For those admirers of his TV dramas, this is an invaluable primer to many of the themes of the Singing Detective, Blue Remembered Hills and the like. Highly recommended.