Sing a song of Dennis Potter today.

Sing a dark song and use your troubles wisely today in honor of British writer Dennis Potter, born on this day in 1935.  "Just letting it out is one of the definitions of bad art," he once said.  Yet just getting it out was not easy for the writer.  Like his protagonist Marlowe in his most famous work, The Singing Detective, Potter suffered from psoriatic arthritis, so severely that he often wrote with his pen tied to his hand.  Although it was remade as a 2003 Hollywood movie, The Singing Detective originated as a six-part BBC miniseries that blended fact, fiction and genres, as a bed-ridden Marlowe tumbles through fevered fantasies and surreal musical numbers set to famous 1940's tunes.  Potter died at the age of 59.