Cold Lazarus

I remember first watching this series back in 1996 and immediately being struck by the originality of Dennis Potter's idea about raiding a person's memory and using it as the ultimate form of television entertainment. Now, rewatching it 25 years later, I can't help but think that if Mr Potter were only alive today to see today's ever-growing fascination with reality TV, he could justifiably say "I told you so".

It can't be stressed enough that viewers to this four-part series really must watch its predecessor "Karaoke", set in the present-day and establishing the central character of Albert Finney's troubled Daniel Feeld, a writer suffering with health problems. As he approaches his end, we learn that he has devoted a large portion of his personal fortune to a medical organisation specialising in cryogenics. At the time, that minor detail just seemed like an oddity, but it becomes in this series the fulcrum of the succeeding story as we see his disembodied head still functioning neurologically in a cryolab sone 400 years later. A small team of scientists led by Frances De La Tour's Professor Purlock and prominently including a rebellious Slav doctor played by Ciaran Hinds have found the means to unlock and indeed visualise Feeld's old memories but given that the work is funded by a harridan megalomaniac Martina Masdon, played by Diane Ladd, who watches every penny spent by the lab, at least when she's not indulging her sexual needs with dimwitted scantily-dressed young hunks, the question arises as to whether she will continue to bankroll their expensive research.

Also interested in Feeld's memories is sleazy American media-baron, the appropriately-named David Siltz, played with grubby elan by Tony Goodman, who sees the commercial possibilities in packaging Feeld's subconscious recollections into TV entertainment and will stop at nothing to get his way. So we see him schmooze Masdon, bribe Purlock with the promise of unlimited funding and personal gain for her and her team, use his influence with the head of police and even torture one of Purlock's team to procure an "inside man", all in the name of TV ratings.

It becomes clear that Feeld's memories reveal a deeply disturbed childhood involving a lurid episode of child abuse. We then get glimpses of happier episodes in the growing Feeld's life including a romantic episode with a pretty young Welsh girl while at college, but most of the memories take us back to key moments in the "Karaoke" series which serve to both signpost and inform this later narrative. This is all played out to a background of (sorry, couldn't help using the word) a dystopian world where a protest group called Reality or Nothing is using guerrilla tactics to try to roll back the creep of computerisation overtaking humanity.

Potter perhaps uses a big hammer at times to chip away at his chosen targets like medical ethics, the dehumanisation of daily life and of course exploitation TV but the central story of the battle for Daniel Feeld's soul drives the work and makes for a compelling sci-fi thriller. Considering the obvious budget restrictions of British TV, I think the future-age production is well realised. I liked the way that Feeld's memories are shown as being almost dream-like and there were nice predictors of the future too in terms of communication, food-production and transport devices, where it looks to me like Potter anticipated satellite navigation for one thing.

I did perhaps feel that the characterisation of such obvious monsters as Masdon and Siltz fell too often into caricaturisation but came away from my combined eight-hours of viewing the life and afterlife of Daniel Feeld over these two well-directed and well-acted series with a still higher appreciation of the talent of Dennis Potter and a kind of satisfaction that unlike say, Dickens or F Scott Fitzgerald, he managed to complete his final work before his death.

I'm a big fan of British TV and this series sounded as though it was going to be right up my alley.

While the parts with the scientists were fine enough, too much time was spent with "Martina" the American financier - her bits were absolutely unwatchable, contained zero entertainment or interest value and effectively torpedoed what would have otherwise escaped as a passable sci-fi yarn.

Perhaps this could be remade with more focus on what makes the story interesting.

3 out of 10

I consider Dennis Potter's "The Singing Detective" the best thing ever to appear on TV. "Karaoke-Cold Lazarus" are contenders for second place. It is vital to see Karaoke first because Dennis Potter wrote them as a part of a whole.

Potter racing against the clock to finish Lazarus before he died. They are funny, weird, mysterious and profound -- a rare combination for any medium. It helps to know a bit of Potter's bio to fully appreciate the depth of this accomplishment.

My favorite moment came when slimy TV producer Siltz exults in the opportunity to own a writer's mind (literally) in order to exploit it. I can imagine the smile on Potter's face when he first conceived that scene, seeing it as a metaphor for his showbiz struggles with the Siltzes of the world.

Anyone who appreciates great writing will love this. Dennis Potter wrote a brilliant script about his own death. I doubt anyone will top his feat for a long time.

karaoke was really good, i liked the story and how it developed...kept me watching. cold lazarus was awful, i could not follow the story because the production and acting was horrible...the British really suck at doing science fiction..it was like the 70s version of doctor who...but i am writing this after only watching the first episode. i am fast forwarding now to get to albert finney's role in this ugly thing, maybe he can save it...but i doubt it. I don't understand how there could be such a disconnect between the karaoke and cold lazarus productions. i can't imagine the writer could have had such different visions of the two, so how did the people involved with actually bringing the written story to TV, misinterpret the writing

This miniseries is a fitting capstone to a brilliant and unique career. In Karaoke, Dennis Potter gave us a heartbreakingly personal look at the end of Daniel Feeld's life; A writer of surreal musical miniseries for TV feels like he is losing control over his written work, both literally (as his words break free and get spoken by real people surrounding him) and metaphorically, as the director of his latest screenplay tries to refashion it in his own image.

In Cold Lazarus, the situation is somewhat reversed. The setting and basic storyline are, by comparison to Karaoke, quite impersonal. The sci-fi "dystopia" is well done and entertainingly campy, with some real strokes of brilliance (the "Reality or Nothing" terrorists who fight the media's dominance), but it's hardly as personal or unique as a typical Potter drama's set-up.

But ironically, the struggle that Daniel Feeld (now only a head, frozen for four hundred years) faces in Cold Lazarus is far more personal, as he literally loses control of his own life and is forced to re-live his own painful memories, without the ability to edit them or filter them through his own creative processes.

The metaphor is set up for us by Feeld's dying words, which we hear in the first segment: "No biography". While Dennis Potter always drew from his own life to a large degree in his writing, he apparently did not relish the idea of other writers attempting to pick through his real life.

Fortunately for us, though, he was (as always) not nearly as reticent about interpreting or re-casting his own life for us. As a contrast to the sci-fi sequences, he presents us with our final glimpse of childhood in his beloved Forest of Dean, in a series of flashbacks that may even as personal as any of the similar scenes in The Singing Detective.

The first time I saw Cold Lazarus, it didn't really grab me, but since seeing it a second time, its story and ideas have stuck in my brain to a huge degree. As I say, it is truly a fitting "final opus" for one of the most distinctive and creative writers of the 20th century; hopefully one day soon, this work (and many more of Potter's creations) will be available on DVD.