The minute Dennis Potter arrived in Oxford as an undergraduate, he made it clear exactly where he was coming from. The man whose fame would eventually border on notoriety as Britain's most controversial TV playwright had humble roots.

His father was a miner, and one of the young Potter's first acts at Oxford was to insist that the college scouts - or servants - desisted from addressing him as "Sir".

For, as Oxford writer Humphrey Carpenter reveals in his new biography of Potter, the shy, working-class Dennis was acutely embarrassed that a man who was old enough to be his father would also be the man who would make his bed, shine his shoes - and call him "Sir".

Potter's unusual request soon made him "the talk of the scouts" - so he was controversial, even as far back as October 1956, when he first came up to New College. Potter might have been just a grammar school boy, but he was a clever grammar school boy and nothing about Oxford fazed him.

He said later: "My assumption when I went up there was that everyone was going to be so much better, brighter and more intelligent - what shocked me when I got there was how easy everything was."

It was certainly easy for him to make himself noticed - either by being fined and reprimanded by the college authorities for drunken behaviour, or by accusing fellow undergraduate Brian Walden of trying to influence the elections for the Presidency of the Oxford Union.

At the time, Walden was so incensed by the accusation that he remarked that he'd have liked to "got my hands on Potter's throat". The Oxford Mail reported that the Union had not seen such an uproar since the 'King and Country' debate before the war. Walden threatened to sue, but in the end the affair just made Potter famous throughout the entire University, althou- gh Brian Walden refuses to discuss it to this day.

Potter also astonished his posh Oxford pals by declaring that he intended to marry the daughter of another coalminer from his home in the Forest of Dean. He needled them a bit more by suggesting that the girl in question, Margaret Morgan, who he was indeed to marry, had been treated badly when she'd come up to Oxford to visit him.

Working class undergraduates had a problem when it came to getting a girlfriend - the girls were mainly posh and the class issue was still rife.

Potter, typically, got round it by marrying a girl from home - but not before he'd been "terrified" by an upper middle-class knockout who used to fancy him and showed it by sitting on the desk opposite him in the offices of the student magazine Isis, which Potter edited, swinging her legs. One contemporary recalled: "She seemed to be demented about Dennis and he couldn't cope with this at all."

It's ironic that the man who was later to cause such an uproar with his television plays that he was labelled 'Dirty Den' should be so afraid of a pretty girl's interest - but as Carpenter's book shows, Potter was both fascinated and appalled by sex all his life.

By this time, he was starting to annoy the other grammar school boys who were also at the University with his 'miner's son at Oxford' image. They started referring to him sarcastically as "the only person with a humble background at Oxford".

Under his editorship, Isis launched a string of attacks on various Establishment figures, and at one point Potter was in serious danger of being sent down.

He survived - and eventually left Oxford with a Second. The coalminer's son had left his mark on the dreaming spires - and was to leave his mark on television drama for the next 30 years, despite suffering from a terrible skin disease which caused him pain and disfigurement.

He died months after his beloved Margaret in 1994.

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