Seeing the Blossom centres on Dennis Potter’s ‘final interview’, which is shown in its entirety. Conducted by broadcaster Melvyn Bragg, the interview aired on Channel 4 just weeks before the writer and dramatist’s death in 1994.
Recorded with the knowledge that he was dying, the interview represented an extraordinary epitaph delivered by Potter himself. Examining his long career in television, the legacy of the post-war settlement, and the impact of media on democracy, Potter’s analysis of public life and political discontent crackles with prescience.
The interview is arguably the notoriously exacting dramatist's final, virtuoso performance. Filmed on a largely empty television set, the sparse staging comprised two chairs and a side table for Potter’s cigarettes, champagne and the liquid morphine he relied on to control his pain. While the conversation ranges between politics, childhood, and religion, Potter's discussions of his experiences with chronic illness and mortality are most striking.
The lucidity with which he discusses his own death was startling at the time, and over thirty years later, it remains deeply emotive. In one of the interview’s most memorable passages, Potter recalls the blossom in his garden that Spring as "...the whitest, frothiest, blossomest blossom that there ever could be. Things are both more trivial than they ever were, and more important than they ever were, and the difference between the trivial and the important doesn’t seem to matter".
The interview is presented alongside Hilary Lloyd’s video Blossom (2017). The work, which employs a static camera and single take, captures a swaying floral, brightened and blurred to pink impressions by hot white sunlight. By focusing on this singular motif, Lloyd enacts a slow and attentive gaze that balances stillness and motion, as well as affective close-up with distanced observation.
Seeing the Blossom is presented as part of Hilary Lloyd, Very High Frequency.
An Interview with Dennis Potter
A Without Walls Special
LWT for Channel 4, tx. 5/4/1994
70 mins, colour
Credit: LWT/Channel 4
Hilary Lloyd, Blossom, 2017
Video, 34 mins 40 secs
Credit: courtesy of the artist and Sadie Coles HQ, London.
Supported by Kvadrat.
Lead Programme Supporters: Ampersand Foundation and Sadie Coles HQ, London. Supported by a National Lottery Project Grant from Arts Council England and The Studio Voltaire Council. With additional support from Brian Boylan and Raven Row, London.
Studio Voltaire’s 2025-2026 exhibition programme is supported by Cockayne Grants for the Arts.
