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MovieMail's Review
Albert Finney stars as the head in a jar in Potter's science fiction drama, set 350 years in the future. It could well find Potter a potent new audience with Dr Who fans reckons Peter Wild.
After almost 14 years of back and forth, Karaoke and Cold Lazarus, Dennis Potter’s final two TV dramas, which were originally shown posthumously on BBC and Channel 4, have received a DVD release – and a long overdue pleasure it is to see them again. Both written under the cosh, as Potter battled with pancreatic cancer, Karaoke and Cold Lazarus deliver an extraordinary punch managing to summarise Potter’s career to date whilst at the same time interacting with one another and signposting where Potter might possibly have gone next, had he been given the opportunity.
Karaoke concerns a writer called Daniel Feelds (played by Albert Finney) who is struggling with his health somewhat (we first meet him in the midst of a day dream that itself harks back to the likes of Pennies from Heaven, as he undergoes an uncomfortable hospital procedure) and possibly gradually becoming unhinged as he sees people in the world about him apparently uttering lines from the film he is working on (which is itself called ‘Karaoke’). The film within a film scenes featuring Ian McDiarmid are darkly humorous – McDiarmid closely resembling Potter himself – and serve to direct eagle-eyed Potter fans back to the likes of both Blackeyes (in which a young model attempts to rewrite the story foisted upon her by an omniscient narrator) and Doubledare (which featured characters locked in time and destined to repeat the same actions over and over again).
Cold Lazarus is set 350 years in the future, a fully-fledged science fiction drama that could actually find a potent new audience with Dr Who fans. Daniel Feelds is now a head in a jar, experimented upon by scientists who don’t know that he has achieved a kind of consciousness while they attempt to excavate his memories for commercial benefit among the bland citizens of a crass Americanised future (all of which gives Potter enormous scope for satire). The theme of confined bodies with wandering minds, here demonstrated by Daniel's cryogenically preserved head, is a familiar theme to Potter's drama, having previously been explored through the psoriatic, bed-bound Philip Marlow in The Singing Detective and the incarcerated Giacomo Casanova in Potter's 1971 drama.
Taken together with The Essential Dennis Potter boxset, this is an essential purchase both for fans and for those who need to catch up with one of the greatest English dramatists of the twentieth century.
Cold Lazarus is the four-part British television drama written by Dennis Potter with the knowledge that he was dying of cancer of the pancreas. It forms the second half of a pair with the television serial Karaoke and was unique in being a co-production between the BBC and Channel 4 - something Potter had expressly requested before his death.
The cryogenically stored brain of Daniel Freed is trapped in a future world where scientists gather to watch his projected memories. Under pressure from rival corporate interests, the scientists fall victim to the tricks that memory can play, picking at threads as they try to comprehend how personal histories are written - and can be rewritten. As elements of truth and fiction explosively intertwine, will the mind of Daniel Feeld finally be set free?
