Review for Dennis Potter: Karaoke & Cold Lazarus

Dennis Potter is almost like Marmite. Those who love him will praise his works until the ends of the Earth, those who hate it, love nothing more than to curse it. Me? I'm somewhere in the middle. I have seen much of his work, from The Singing Detective to Lipstick on Your Collar and Potter's work has been a mixture of sex, depravity, enlightenment and the general search for redemption. The fact that he spent much of his life with psoriatic arthropathy which caused the deterioration of his hands into what he dubbed 'clubs' and his final years saw him battle with cancer is often in his work. Much of it is melancholic and some see it lacking in the human spirit. You can watch much of his work and find few characters who you would want to relate to, which makes watching it even more difficult.

His last two works Karaoke and Cold Lazarus, completed after his death, was an interesting exercise as it saw for the first time BBC and Channel 4 work together to create two pieces of work that fed off each other. However, though this was an interesting premise, it did not make for interesting viewing.

Karaoke stars Albert Finney as Daniel Feeld, a playwright who is working on a television production of his latest play. He finds that people he is encountering are saying lines from his play. He begins to fear that his work may come true and begins to change to play to avoid the real Sandra, Saffron Burrows being killed. This paranoia leads to many people speculating it is due to his deteriorating health and upon discovering he only has a few weeks to live, he donates his body to cryogenic research.

Cold Lazarus is set in 24th Century Britain, where a dystopian society is in control and a cryogenic lab has decided to try and revive the mind of Feeld. The project is about to be shut down, but it is kept running by Siltz, a media mogul (A thinly veiled Rupert Murdoch) who sees that Feeld's memories will bring forth images of sex and violence which could make him a fortune on Television. As the memories are broadcast, it also appears that Feeld is trying to communicate with the scientists to allow him to die which brings all the scientists to doubt what they are doing.

Both dramas are played out over four episodes and I think the one thing that is missing from both is humour. It's understandable that as Potter was dying as he wrote this, that this would not be full of jokes, but there is a feeling that the biting satire of his earlier work (though it did lean a bit more towards black comedy) would have made these pieces a lot more enjoyable. I found Karaoke went on far too long and though the premise was good for maybe one episode, by episode three, I became restless and just wanted them to get on with it. Cold Lazarus feels like your typical low-budget British Science Fiction and when compared to anything recent looks incredibly dated. Though I understand the 1984/Brazil-like aesthetic they were going for, it just didn't work and the story of taking out the memories of the writer was just a bit too far fetched and leaned towards Videodrome only without having the guts to go the whole hog with it.

As Potter was not alive to oversee either of these productions, it is hard to blame him for what became of his last works. My feeling is that they should have only produced Karaoke and not bothered with Cold Lazarus, which is extremely disappointing. Karaoke has its points, and the acting by Finney is excellent, but I found both series a little cumbersome to watch. If you do want to see Potter's best work, it would be better to seek out his earlier stuff as if this is your only exposure to him; you may come away thinking he was overrated, which is not the case in the slightest.