Dennis Potter: I think mine’s [my chair’s] with the ashtray. Hmmmm, is that too conspicuous there? [moving hipflask of liquid morphine from the table]… I’ll only need it when I need it – if there are any spasms – or… I should put it out of sight, yeah.

Melvyn Bragg: How long have you been working on this new thing?

Since I knew [about his cancer]. February the 14th, since I knew, you know what was happening, but I’ve just got to hope I’ve got enough days to finish it, you know, I’m keeping to a... I’m working to a very hard schedule... I’m driving myself, you know even when I walk up and down – with the pain sometimes you’ve just got to keep moving – I still have a pen in my hand so I can put a sentence down when it... you know it’s like that. It keeps me going really. There’d be no point in being, in remaining if I didn’t, because it’s just simply blank. There’s no treatment possible, it’s just simply blanking out pain with morphine, so it’s finding the balance between the amount of pain that allows you to work and the amount that you need to blank out – because if you blank it out totally you can’t work, but if you don’t … The pain and the work: it’s one of those ratios that you have to kind of work out daily.

Are you set now, shall we? How did you and when did you first find out you had this, err, cancer?

Well, I knew for sure on St Valentine’s Day, it was like a little gift, a little kiss from somebody or something. I had – obviously, I had, suspicions… I had a lot of pain before then and there was a quite accidental sort of misdiagnosis of the condition in London when I was on the wing on something, and an assumption being made initially that it was, I don’t know, an ulcer or a spastic colon and all that sort of thing which meant unfortunately, because Margaret my wife was ill and I was unwilling to leave her at that time, so I was not mixing up doctors, that I had, er, December, and January particularly, when I was trying to control what in effect I now realise was the pain of cancer with, err, with Panadol, which was ludicrous so in a way it was almost a relief to find out what it was – cancer of the pancreas, with secondary cancers already in the liver and with the knowledge that it can’t be treated. You know there’s nothing – neither chemotherapy nor surgery are appropriate, it’s simply analgesic care ’til you ‘goodnight Vienna’, as they say in football I believe nowadays. And I’ve been working since then, flat out, at strange hours because I’m done in the evenings, mostly because of the morphine and also the pain is very energy sapping, but I do find that I can be at my desk at five o’clock in the morning and I’m keeping to a schedule of pages and I will and do that schedule everyday. I’ve had to attend to my affairs as well, [laughs] I remember reading that phrase when I was a kid ‘he had time to attend to his affairs’ but what it did give me also, I mean I’ve always... I mean as a child without question I knew for a fact – and there’s no argument about this – that I was a coward, a physical coward and often I’m also, I’m a very, I’m a really cripplingly shy person actually. I hate new situations, new people, with almost a dread. Now those two consequences in your adult life can really create serious wrong impressions of yourself to yourself and of yourself to other people because you try to compensate for what you know that a) you’re a coward and b) you’re shy; so that can lead to aggression and a sort of the reverse, the obverse of shy, the arrogance if you like, because you’re wearing it like a cloak in order to get through a particular… but having to let that drop and to find out that in fact, at the last, thank God you’re not actually a coward. I haven’t shed a tear since I knew. I grieve for my family and friends who know me closely; obviously they’re going through it, in a sense more than I am, you know, but I discover also what you always know to be true but you never know it until you know it – sorry but my voice is echoing in my head for some reason- hmmm that the, I think it was actually to you that I remember Martin Amis saying something about you reach 40 or your middle age and nobody ever tells you, nobody’s ever told you, you know, what it’s like. Well, it’s the same about knowing about death. We’re the one animal that knows we’re going to die and yet we carry on, you know, paying our mortgages, doing our jobs, moving about, behaving as though there’s eternity in a sense and we forget or tend to forget that life can only be defined in the present tense it is, is, is and it is now only. I mean much as we would like to call back yesterday and indeed yearn to, and ache to sometimes, we can’t, it’s in us but we can’t – it’s not there in front of us. And however predictable tomorrow is – and unfortunately for most people, most of the time, it’s too predictable: they’re locked into whatever situation they’re locked into. Even so, no matter how predictable it is there’s the element of unpredictable – you don’t know – the only thing you know for sure is the present tense and that now-ness becomes so vivid to me now that almost, in a perverse sort of way, I’m almost serene. You know, I can celebrate life... And 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. But the now-ness of everything is absolutely wondrous. If people could see that, there’s no way of telling you, you have to experience it, you know. But the glory of it, if you like, the comfort of it, the reassurance – not that I’m interested in reassuring people, you know, bugger that – the, the truth, the fact is that if you see the present tense, boy do you see it and boy can you celebrate it, you know.

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