Blue Remembered Hills (Show)

Blue Remembered Hills is a television play by Dennis Potter, originally broadcast on January 30th 1979 as part of the BBC's Play for Today series. The play concerns a group of silly seven year olds playing in the Forest of Dean one summer afternoon during 1943. It displays how victimisation and stereotypical views occur even in young children, and ends abruptly when the character of "Donald" is burned to death as a result of the other children's actions. The play, despite seeming very frivolous (bar the final scene) on first reading, is in fact reflecting on the human capability for brutality, especially in children, and is in a similar vein to William Golding's The Lord of The Flies. The most striking feature of the play was that though the characters were children they were played by adult actors. Potter first used this device in Stand Up, Nigel Barton (1965) and would return to it in Cold Lazarus (1996). The dialogue is written in a Forest of Dean dialect, which Potter also uses extensively in other dramas incorporating a Forest of Dean setting - most notably A Beast with Two Backs (1968), Pennies from Heaven (1978) and The Singing Detective (1986).