After standing for parliament as a Labour candidate at the 1964 general election, his health was affected by the onset of psoriatic arthropathy which necessitated Potter to change career and led to his becoming a television dramatist.

He began with contributions to BBC1's regular series The Wednesday Play from 1965, and he continued to work in the medium for the rest of his life, including writing screenplay adaptations for Hollywood studios.

During his speech at the 1993 James MacTaggart Memorial Lecture, Potter referred to this event when explaining his decision to switch from newspaper journalism to screenwriting: "Different words had to be found, with different functions.

This book is a study of class and social mobility that demonstrates an early fascination with the effects of the mass media on British cultural life.

The former recounts the experience of a miner's son attending Oxford University where he finds himself torn between two worlds, culminating in Barton's participation in a television documentary.

[17] The second play features the same character standing as a Labour candidate—his disillusionment with the compromises of electoral politics is based on Potter's own experience.

As a result, references to Mr Bates' membership of the National Front and a scene discussing racial segregation were omitted—as were many of the non-naturalistic flourishes present in the television production—although the film was much more graphic in its depiction of sexual abuse and rape.

He returned to the BBC for a co-production with 20th Century Fox, writing the scripts for a widely praised but seldom-seen miniseries of F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night (1985) with Mary Steenburgen as Nicole Diver.

The serial was adapted into a novel (see below), In 1990, referring to a scene in The Singing Detective, Mary Whitehouse claimed on BBC Radio that Potter had been influenced by witnessing his mother engaging in adulterous sex.

[25] In 1979 in an interview for The South Bank Show, he rejected "the chorus of abuse" suffered by Whitehouse because she accepted the "central moral importance of – to use the grandest word – art".

Potter makes a sly reference to this in Karaoke when the character Daniel Feeld (Albert Finney) is invited to provide dialogue for an "arthritic goat" in a children's film.

Potter's reputation within the American film industry following the box office disappointments of Pennies from Heaven and Gorky Park ultimately led to difficulty receiving backing for his projects.

Potter is known to have written adaptations of The Phantom of the Opera, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, The White Hotel and his earlier television play Double Dare (1976): all these reached the preproduction stage before work was suspended.

The film starred Louise Germaine and Brian Dennehy (who had appeared respectively in Lipstick on Your Collar and Gorky Park) and was directed by Renny Rye.

Potter's chosen topic was what he perceived to be a contamination of news media and its effect on declining standards in British television "particularly journalists who criticised his Channel 4 series Lipstick on Your Collar", Kelvin MacKenzie "the sharp little oaf who edits the Sun" and Garry Bushell "that sub-literate homophobic, sniggering rictus of a lout".

Set during the Suez Crisis of 1956 like the much earlier Lay Down Your Arms (1970), elements of which it recycled, this six-parter did not become a popular success and in it Potter returned to use of lip-synched musical numbers in the manner of Pennies from Heaven.

"[34] Potter's final commission came from The Daily Telegraph Arts & Books section, prompted by the TV interview in March, to which he replied on 16 May, after honouring his television commitments: "I am pleased to tell you that I have completed Karaoke and Cold Lazarus – which I regard as essentially one eight-part piece.

"[35] Immediately he was prompted to consider "the prospect of confronting imminent death" and on 25 May he submitted "my first and last short story" titled "Last Pearls",[36] which was published on 4 June, days before he died.

This concept forms the core of Potter's next two novels, and portions of Hide and Seek would reappear in several of his television plays, especially Follow the Yellow Brick Road (1972) and The Singing Detective.

Ticket to Ride (1986) was written between drafts of The Singing Detective and concerns a herbithologist who is unable to make love to his wife unless he imagines her as a prostitute.

This was followed in 1987 by Blackeyes: a study of a model whose abusive uncle, a writer, has stolen details of his niece's experiences in the glamour industry as the basis for his latest potboiler.

The play text for Blue Remembered Hills was first published in the collection Waiting for the Boat (with Joe's Ark and Blade on the Feather) in 1984 and has since enjoyed several successful stage performances.

Potter proposed to write an "intermedia" stage play for producers Geisler-Roberdeau based on William Hazlitt's Liber Amoris, or The New Pygmalion, but he died before it could be commenced.

They are frequently used in works where the line between fantasy and reality becomes blurred, often as a result of the influence of popular culture (Willie, the Wild West obsessive played by Hywel Bennett in Where the Buffalo Roam) or from a character's apparent awareness of their status as a pawn in the hands of an omniscient author (the actor Jack Black (Denholm Elliott) in Follow the Yellow Brick Road first broadcast in 1972).

Potter's characters are frequently "doubled up"; either by Doppelgänger, using the same actor to play two roles (Kika Markham as the actress and the escort in Double Dare; Norman Rossington as Lorenzo the gaoler and the English traveller in Casanova) or two actors whose characters' destinies and personalities appear linked (Bob Hoskins and Kenneth Colley as Arthur and the accordion man in Pennies from Heaven; Rufus (Christian Rodska) and Gina the bear in A Beast With Two Backs).

Sometimes it is personal (Stand Up, Nigel Barton), political (Traitor; Cold Lazarus) and other times it is sexual (A Beast With Two Backs; Brimstone and Treacle).

In plays where this occurs, the outsider will commit some apparently liberating act of evil (rape in Brimstone and Treacle) or violence (murder in Shaggy Dog) that gives physical expression to the un-sublimated desires of the characters in that setting.

Although Potter won few awards, he was and remains held in high regard by many within the television and film industry and was an influence on such creators as Mark Frost, Steven Bochco, Andrew Davies, Alain Resnais and Peter Bowker.

[46][47] BBC Four marked the tenth anniversary of Potter's death in December 2004 with documentaries about his life and work, accompanied by showings of Pennies from Heaven and The Singing Detective, as well as several of his single plays—many of which had not been shown since their initial broadcast.

[48] Potter's papers, including unproduced plays and unpublished fiction, are being catalogued and preserved at the Dean Heritage Centre in Gloucestershire.