“I think we all have this little theatre on top of our shoulders, where the past and the present and our aspirations and our memories are simply and inexorably mixed. What makes each one of us unique is the potency of the individual mix.

“We can make our lives only when we know what our lives have been. And drama is about how you make the next moment. It’s like when you’re watching a sporting event, like a soccer game here; when it’s going on, you don’t know what’s going to happen. But all the rules are laid down.

“I don’t make the mistake that high culture mongers do of assuming that because people like cheap art, their feelings are cheap, too. When people say, ‘Oh listen, they’re playing our song,’ they don’t mean, ‘Our song, this little cheap tinkling, syncopated piece of rubbish is what we felt when we met.’ What they saying is ‘That song reminds us of the tremendous feeling we had when we met.’ Some of the songs I use are great anyway but the cheaper songs are still in the direct line of descent from David’s Psalms. They’re saying, ‘Listen, the world isn’t quite like this, the world is better than this, there is love in it,’ ‘There’s you and me in it’ or ‘The sun is shining in it.’

“So called dumb people, simple people, uneducated people, have as authentic and profound a depth of feeling as the most educated on earth. And anyone who says different is a fascist.”

— Dennis Potter