Cold Lazarus
|
|
Cold Lazarus is a television play written by Dennis Potter with the knowledge that he was dying from cancer of the pancreas.
It forms the second half of a pair with the television play Karaoke. The two plays were filmed as a single production by the same team; both were directed by Renny Rye and feature Albert Finney as the writer Daniel Feeld. Both plays were unique in being co-productions between the BBC and their rivals Channel 4, something Potter had expressly requested before his death. The show was first aired on Channel 4 in 1996 on Sunday evenings, with a repeat on BBC1 the following day.
In a distant dystopian future, researchers study the cryonically-preserved head of Daniel Feeld, a twentieth-century writer, attempting to extract and record his memories in a form that can be broadcast as the latest version of reality television.
As they seek out the writer's most explicit and painful (and therefore most marketable) memories, one of the researchers becomes convinced that the head is regaining consciousness during their experiments.
Meanwhile, beyond the laboratory, other forces gather.