Dennis Potter’s last two teleplays are availble on DVD, and well worth picking up for your collection. They were the last he did before he died. You may recall some of his other work, like The Singing Detective, and Pennies from Heaven (the original, not the Steve Martin ripoff).

Potter was the mad genius of Brit TV, he explored the idea of multiple nested realities, the role of ambiguity, and the realization that regardless of whether or not your current perceptual universe is the real one, it is nonetheless the one you’re going to have to deal with, whether you like it or not. What’s really confusing is that his protagonist is suffering from the exact same dilemma. With Potter, you never know who is talking, his hero, or the author. In the Singing Detective, a mixture of fantasy and autobiography, you’re never quite sure who is talking to you. The hero suffers from the same horrible disease that afflicted the writer.

Karaoke and Cold Lazarus are intimately related, the latter is actually a sequel to the first, but each stands totally independent of the other, and either can be watched by itself. It’s only when you’ve seen both do you realize how the themes of each are interwoven and intertwined, and how they are eventually resolved, even though the two stories are separated by a span of four centuries.

Karaoke is about a writer working on a TV miniseries who starts noticing that his character’s lines are being repeated to him by complete strangers. He doesn’t know whether he is going mad,or if he has somehow misremembered, transposed or confused real events with his script. During the course of his investigation, he stumbles into a horrible subplot which he now realizes is inevitable, and he knows how it will turn out if he doesn’t stop it. The central conceit is that like Karaoke (also the name of the play-within-a-play) we are all mouthing pre-written lines. Potter is all about the nature of reality, and the role we play in forming it; a theme near and dear to my heart.

Meanwhile’s, he is dying, and he knows his days are numbered. His doctor advises him he may not have time to finish his next project, Cold Lazarus, a science fiction tale set in the far future, when frozen corpses are being thawed out for ghastly scientific experiments, and become pawns in political and economic warfare. The writer has a brother who worked in cryogenics, and he has an obsession with the idea.

I guess you can probably see where this is all heading, so there’s no point in my risking a spoiler.

Check it out. It is magnificent. Albert Finney has the starring role…in both! And he is magnificent as well.