Media Heritage and Memory in the Museum: Managing Dennis Potter’s Legacy in the Forest of Dean

Abstract

This research explores the ways in which Dennis Potter (1935-1994) is made inheritable to audiences through a rural Heritage Lottery Funded project. With the sale of the written Potter Archive to the Dean Heritage Centre, Gloucestershire, in 2010, this study explores in great detail the processes enacted to interpret the Potter Archive as cultural (television) heritage. Through a creative and innovative research design which utilises autoethnography, inventive qualitative methods and a level of quantitative analysis, this study examines the ways in which Potter is made intelligible to past television audiences, project members and collaborators, local people, and the casual tourist within the heritage environment. A unique and irreproducible study, this interdisciplinary research sits as a contribution to an emerging field that is located at the interface between Memory studies and Museum Studies and explores the way various forms of mediation are connected to these fields. Inherently at stake in this research is the valorisation of television as heritage, as Potter remains well within living memory. Through proximate and intimate connections to this multifaceted heritage project this work represents one of the first interventions to explore turning television into heritage at a local level drawing together the macro level of cultural policy with the micro level of enacting that policy. In asking how Dennis Potter’s legacy is managed in the Forest of Dean heritage environment, this thesis explores the ways Potter’s legacy is mediated, how television heritage is consumed and made meaningful (or struggles for meaning) in the museum space, how a writer’s legacy is interpreted by heritage professionals, volunteers, past television audiences and museum visitors, and how television as heritage is consumed online. This thesis makes visible the underlying mechanisms by which the Dennis Potter Archive is (or might yet become) articulated as television heritage, through examining the core managerial, interpretive and memorial processes involved in this high stakes, multi-partner project