Dennis Potter script discovered that casts new light on The Singing Detective

It was a little like discovering the television drama equivalent of a lost Harold Pinter or Samuel Beckett play.

An unknown script for a television play by the dramatist Dennis Potter that sheds new light on his drama The Singing Detective has been unearthed among an archive of his work in his forest homeland.

Entitled The Last Television Play, the 60-page script features sequences and scenes that were to appear in the celebrated BBC series starring Michael Gambon as the mystery writer Philip E Marlow who is admitted to hospital with a chronic skin and joint disease.

John Cook, a professor of media at Glasgow Caledonian University, who discovered the script at the Potter archive at Dean Heritage Centre in the Forest of Dean, Gloucestershire, summed up his reaction as: “Wow.” He said: “This was it. I’d found not only an unknown television play by Dennis Potter but the seeds, the origins of The Singing Detective, his most famous work. It’s a remarkable, wonderfully inventive piece, very experimental.”

Potter, who died in 1994, began writing The Singing Detective in the spring of 1985 and it appeared on UK screens on Sunday nights in 1986. Scenes such as doctors and nurses lip-syncing the 1947 hit Dry Bones and the protagonist having his skin greased by a nurse to ease his pain became classics.

In a Radio Times interview publicising The Singing Detective in 1986, Potter appears to have hinted at the existence of The Last Television Play, describing how his most famous work had originally begun as a series of scenes set in a hospital ward, which he thought were “quite promising”.

But when Cook, the author of Dennis Potter: A Life on Screen, later asked him if he had any draft manuscripts of The Singing Detective, Potter said it was unlikely as he tended to rip them up.

After the Potter archive was saved for the nation thanks to a fundraising effort by residents of the Forest of Dean, where Potter was born, Cook began going through a vast collection of finished typescripts, manuscript copies, notebooks and papers, with one of his aims to find the beginnings of The Singing Detective.

“I hoped to find fragments but what I found was a complete previously unknown television play,” he said.

The piece, thought to have been created a few years before The Singing Detective, was written in Potter’s painstakingly neat handwriting in a private notebook. “I see these as the engine room of his creativity, the nuts and bolts of how he worked,” said Cook.

Inserted in the front of the notebook was a mock eulogy to Potter in his handwriting in which a “vicar” says: “To put the adjectival noun Television in front of the noble old word Playwright is the same kind of diminution as putting the adjective processed in front of the even more ancient word cheese.” Potter, the mock vicar goes on to explain, died after choking on smoked salmon while heading to the US on Concorde.

Cook worked out that the play itself must have been written not for the BBC but for a commercial rival, as it was structured to include ad breaks. The main character is not Marlow but a writer called Nigel Barton. Potter fans will know he created a working-class antihero called Nigel Barton, who appeared in two of his early works written for the BBC.

While in The Singing Detective the nurse who greases the main character morphs into a nightclub singer, in the earlier version a 1980s dance troupe appears. A famous scene when Marlow is wheeled into a ward is backed in the newly discovered iteration by the Doctor Who theme.

Cook said he believed The Last Television Play was Potter’s homage to the sort of television drama he had written in the 1960s and 1970s but was dying out. At one point Barton says: “I know that I’m either writing a play of my own or I’m in a play by somebody very sly and malignant.” The remark is followed by canned laughter as the drama morphs into a sitcom.

Cook said it felt like the television drama equivalent of finding a lost Pinter or Beckett play. “He takes on all the grand themes,” he said. “There’s a depth to his work. He definitely deserves to be considered in the same breath as some of our postwar playwrights.”