Studio Voltaire, London
10 September 2025 - 11 January 2026
Very High Frequency forms a wide-ranging new commission considering the scope and spirit of playwright, television dramatist and author Dennis Potter (b 1935 — d 1994).
Frequently lauded as one of Britain’s most pioneering television dramatists, Potter’s Brechtian techniques brokered a meaningful and daring relationship between experimental theatre, modernist literature and broadcast television. Challenging the dominant naturalism of terrestrial television dramas, Potter successfully pioneered a multitude of dramatic devices to blur fantasy and reality.
Beginning with shorter-form television plays for the BBC’s Wednesday Play and Play for Today series, his works used a wide variety of techniques including flashback sequences, direct-to-camera address and adult actors playing children. These expanded to encompass the feverish musical interludes and lip-syncs which became the hallmark of his psychodramas and ‘novels for television’, including Pennies From Heaven (1978) and The Singing Detective (1986). Although celebrated for his creativity as both a screenwriter and critic, Potter’s work and personal life was not without controversy. Several of his screenplays were censored or accused of blasphemy, while his sometimes flawed depictions and idolisation of women were similarly scrutinised.
Very High Frequency combines audio-visual elements, performative interludes, filmed interviews and archival materials to stage a non-linear encounter with Potter’s work. More widely, the exhibition and surrounding programmes engage with the themes, confrontations and atmospheres that defined Potter’s oeuvre, navigating his explorations of chronic illness, death, sex, power, morality and class.
Key to the exhibition is a new series of short films that feature actors, producers and collaborators connected to Potter’s work and life. They include broadcaster Melvyn Bragg, and producer Kenith Trodd, the dramatist’s single most important collaborator, with whom he developed much of his significant creative work (Moonlight on the Highway, Pennies from Heaven, The Singing Detective etc). Lloyd’s subjects also include Gina Bellman (Blackeyes, Secret Friends), Richard E. Grant (Karaoke), Alison Steadman (The Singing Detective, Karaoke) and Janet Suzman (The Singing Detective). Captured in abstracted or glancing depictions, the artist’s vignettes form a series of impressionistic portraits.
Though Potter was always reticent to describe his work as straightforwardly autobiographical, he frequently drew close to autofiction; perhaps most famously in The Singing Detective, in which his crime novelist protagonist is hospitalised with psoriatic arthropathy, the same severe chronic illness as Potter. In constructing an environment that stems from Potter’s impact and influences, Lloyd’s own research has centered on key locations tied to his storytelling, particularly the Forest of Dean and Berry Hill where he grew up.
Many of Potter’s works were set and filmed in the area at his insistence, and the Forest of Dean’s working-class mining communities and rural, post-industrial character deeply influenced his writing. As well as Lloyd’s evocative footage of the forest and surrounding landscapes, much of which is marked by the area’s long history of collieries and Freeminers, the artist has collaborated with local researchers and residents who participated in Potter’s television plays. They include former location scout John Belcher, and the Berry Hill Silver Band, originally a colliery ensemble with whom Potter briefly played — and later commissioned — in several productions (A Beast With Two Backs, Cold Lazarus).
Importantly, Lloyd’s films include a record of Potter’s multiple original scripts, which now form the Dennis Potter Collection at the Dean Heritage Centre. Potter’s handwritten drafts are seen alongside typeset scripts which bear his notes and corrections. Filmed using a combination of moving and static camera techniques, close-up, panning sequences of text are interwoven with locked-off shots that linger on marginalia and revisions in red ink, exploring the archive as both a material artefact and a textual record of creative labour.
Very High Frequency places the audience within a choreographed episode or tableau. Referencing stage flats, rigging and curtains, Lloyd’s installation has drawn from the architecture and trappings of dramatic craft: backstage spaces, theatre sets and television studios. Her moving image works sit within precise arrangements of video equipment that inhabit these surrounding spaces like sculptures, connecting a physical dimension to the act of viewing.
However Lloyd does not set out to provide a straightforward or illustrative account of Potter’s life and the contexts for his work. Her films resist standard notions of linear narration, instead attempting to avoid conventional approaches to dramaturgy or performance. She incorporates seemingly incidental moments or observations with images — a flickering light, a flowering garden, an unfamiliar town at night — that serve a more sensory or sensual purpose. In sifting through Potter’s complicated and extensive legacies, Very High Frequency instead traces a series of encounters that unfold from the many people, narratives, images, and locations that Lloyd has engaged with over the course of making the exhibition.