Broadcast as four 50-minute episodes, first screened weekly from 29 November 1989 to 20 December 1989 on Britain's BBC2 channel,[1] Blackeyes starred Gina Bellman as the title character, an attractive model, with Michael Gough in a key role as her uncle.
Six months before screening it was promoted on the cover of The Listener with an image of Gina Bellman in role as the title character and the caption "Potter's Dream - Beyond The Singing Detective".
[7] James Saynor, the magazine's sub-editor at the time, wrote inside of Potter's ambitious desire to subvert the norms of film grammar in the series following an on-set interview with the fledgling director.
[8] In the lead-up to broadcast Potter promoted the series by appearing on TV chat-show Saturday Matters with Sue Lawley and was interviewed in newspapers such as New Statesman and The Observer.
"[15] Sally Payne summed up the tension between Potter's intentions and their execution in the Sunday Times, "My gut feeling was distinct unease which verged on outrage the more I thought about it.
"[23] No stranger to controversy, Potter was stunned by the level of press hostility and was particularly saddened at the way he was labelled with nicknames such as "Dirty Den" and "Television's Mr Filth".
[29] The sequence involves the character of Maurice Kingsley about to sexually abuse his niece Jessica until Potter's voice-over interrupts: "No, you'll have to imagine the rest if you must... the snake in his hand has become the worm in her soul.
In 1993 Potter summed up the initial press reaction to Blackeyes by calling it "a tide of polemical abuse of such huge proportions in the English tabloids that it was almost proof I was stepping on the right nerves, if not totally in the right way".
Acknowledging the original press reaction, he describes the series as being "condemned for feeding the very sickness it claimed to be diagnosing" and defends Potter by asserting that the programme's explicit scenes were "unintended to be titillating to viewers who would elect to see them that way".
"[34] Sergio Angelini calls Blackeyes "a deliberately uncomfortable, humorous, densely imagined, frequently powerful if imperfect work, one that practically vanished after its original airing but which, now that its shock value has long been superseded, needs to be re-assessed by a new generation".