The Present Tense

"Below my window in Ross, when I’m working in Ross, for 

example, there at this season, the blossom is out in full now 

– it’s a plum tree, it looks like apple blossom but it’s white – 

and looking at it, instead of saying ‘Oh, that’s nice blossom!’ 

last week looking at it through the window when I’m writing, 

I see it is the whitest, frothiest, blossomest blossom 

that ever could be, and I can see it. 

Things are both more trivial than they ever were, and more 

important than they ever were, and the difference between 

the trivial and the important doesn’t seem to matter."

Dennis Potter discusses his thoughts on mortality, living in the present...

A short extract from the Melvyn Bragg interview with playwright Dennis Potter recorded on 15th March 1994. 

Potter died on the 7th June that same year.

[Meeting House]

(Ashildr is laid out on furs on a bier as The Doctor 

tosses small components out of the Mire helmet.)

EINARR: What's he doing?

CLARA: Saving her, I think.

(Whirr of sonics, then the Doctor holds 

out a small SIM-type device.)

Dr. Disco : 

It's from the Mire helmet. Battlefield medical kit. 

I've reprogrammed it for human beings.

(He places it on Ashildr's forehead 

and it gets absorbed into her.)

EINARR: 

It's gone. It's inside her.

Dr. Disco : 

It's repairing her. It will never stop repairing her, if it works. 

Come on, Ashildr. Come on. The story's not over yet.

EINARR: (weeping and stroking her hair) Daughter, listen to me. This town has lost so much. If we lose you too there'll be nothing left.

(Nothing for a long pause, then Ashildr gasps and opens her eyes briefly.)

EINARR: Ashildr!

Dr. Disco : She'll be conscious in a day, up and about in three. No swimming for a week. Now, we're going to need a longboat and some of your best rowers. We're two days' sail from the Tardis.

Come on, Clara.

EINARR: Wait, no. She'll want to see you when she wakes.

Dr. Disco : Oh, no. Well, she'll, she'll see me often enough once she understands.

EINARR: Understands what?

Dr. Disco : Second dose.

(He throws another SIM card to Einarr.)

EINARR: Will she need to take this?

Dr. Disco : No, no, no, it's not for her.

CLARA: Then who's it for?

Dr. Disco : Er, whoever she wants.

ASHILDR: (sotto) Doctor, thank you.

Dr. Disco : Oh, don't thank me yet, Ashildr. Not yet.

(The Doctor and Clara leave.)

[Forest]

(Walking towards the Tardis.)

CLARA: Okay, it's official. Silence is even worse 

in a Scottish accent. Are you going to tell me 

what you're brooding about?

Dr. Disco : 

It won't stop, the repair kit I put inside Ashildr, 

not ever. It'll just keep fixing her

.

CLARA: Well, good.

Dr. Disco : 

I'm not sure, but it's entirely possible 

she has lost the ability to die.

CLARA: The ability?

Dr. Disco : 

Oh, Dying is an ability, believe me. 

Barring accidents, she may now be functionally immortal.

(He unlocks the Tardis.)

CLARA: 

If the repair kit never stops working, 

then why did you give her two?

Dr. Disco : 

Immortality isn't Living Forever. 

That's not what it feels like. 

Immortality is everybody else dying. 

She might meet someone 

she can't bear to lose. 

That happens, I believe.

[Tardis]

Dr. Disco : I was angry. I was emotional. Just possibly, I have made a terrible mistake. Maybe even a tidal wave.

(The Tardis dematerialises.)

Dr. Disco : 

Time will tell, it always does.

CLARA: 

Whatever you did for Ashildr, 

I think she deserved it.

Dr. Disco : 

Yes. Yes, she did. But Ashildr isn't just Human any more. There's a little piece of alien inside her, so in a way, she's --

In a way, she's A Hybrid.

(After that allusion to the concept introduced in The Witch's Familiar, we are treated to a representation of Ashildr standing against the passing of more time than a normal human would experience without ageing. Days, seasons, years. She stops smiling and becomes stern.)

Cold Lazarus

“In the opening few minutes of Lazarus, Newton expresses extreme annoyance at his inability to die : ‘I’m a dying man who can’t die actually … not being able to die is a joke. A fucking terrible joke. Apologies for the f-word.’ The audience is allowed to assume at first that his problem of being immortal, or at least extremely long-lived, is somehow due to his alien physiology, with other characters routinely making comments about his extraordinary youthful looks. After a while it becomes clearer to see that Newton is the one standing in the way of his own death. 

In situating the main character’s redemptive arc within a psychological/unconscious space, Lazarus parallels specific approaches that were used to great effect by the British dramatist Dennis Potter in The Singing Detective (BBC 1986) and his final work(s) Karaoke and Cold Lazarus (BBC and Channel 4 1996). 

Potter’s teleplays are distinctive for their use of non-naturalistic, non-linear devices, flashbacks and delirious visions that confuse fantasy and reality. He was also known for steeping aspects of his personal life into his characters and settings. The Singing Detective’s protagonist was a writer who is hospitalised with chronic acute psoriatic arthropathy – Potter himself suffered from this disease and, like his lead character Philip E. Marlow (played by Michael Gambon), Potter also had to resort to writing with a pen tied to his clenched fist. 

Childhood flashbacks are set in the Forest of Dean, where Potter grew up, and on and on, fiction and biographical details dovetail. The Singing Detective sends its protagonist on a journey through medicated dreams, unresolved trauma, psychotherapy and confrontations with uncomfortable personal truths, arriving at eventual healing and wholeness. It is implied that treatment and recovery from his debilitating skin condition has been blocked by his unconscious self, which is also in grave need of healing. 

The Next Day’s final track, ‘Heat’, has thematic connections to the second episode of The Singing Detective, also called ‘Heat’, wherein the main character hallucinates scenes with his deceased father and misremembers repressed traumatic events from his childhood. 

According to Enda Walsh, The Singing Detective was a shared fascination that he and Bowie bonded over and it became a key reference in their early development of Lazarus, alongside Bob Fosse’s semi-autobiographical musical All That Jazz (1979) (Hunter-Tilney 2016). 

The music video for the song ‘Lazarus’, Bowie’s last, appears to reference the visual aesthetic of The Singing Detective’s hospital ward set. The last two television dramas written by Potter were completed in the decline of terminal cancer, produced and broadcast posthumously nearly two years after he died. Karaoke and Cold Lazarus share a central character, Daniel Feeld (played by Albert Finney), and are connected by themes of death, resurrection and redemption. 

Predictably, Feeld (the character) shows many of the traits that Potter was known to possess, not only aspects of his personality and memories but also his profession and predicament : Feeld is a television writer racing against time to complete two screenplays before his terminal condition catches up with him. As he faces the end of his natural life at the conclusion of Karaoke, he decides to allow his corpse to be frozen and preserved in a cryogenic facility in the hope that one day, once a cure for his illness has been found, he might be revived. 

Cold Lazarus is set 374 years in the future, where Feeld’s frozen head has been installed in a science lab to be mined for authentic memories and emotions. Trapped in this future dystopia and forced to repeatedly replay the contents of his mind, it becomes evident that Feeld is aware of his situation and is begging to be put out of his misery. At the climax of the story, which also involves the machinations of various oligarchs and revolutionaries, the frozen head is mercifully destroyed along with the facility it was kept in. Feeld himself is granted a moment of transcendence as his memories play out one last time, now reversing back through his life, memories borrowed from Potter’s own life, his triumphs and traumas folding in upon a clear white light. 

In pulling off this remarkable feat, Potter managed to stage a resurrection of sorts, two years after his first death. A Lazarus-style comeback that allowed him to continue to work and speak from beyond the grave, stage an imagining of his ideal second death and fictively perform the closure of his public life.”

[Arena]

Time’s Champion : 

I have fed you enough,

Gods of Ragnarok — and you found 

what I have to offer :  indigestible.

So, I have taken myself 

OFF The Menu. 

La comedia e finita.


DADDY RAGNAROK : 

We command you. 


MUMMY RAGNAROK : 

You cannot stop. 


Time’s Champion : 

I already have!


DADDY RAGNAROK : 

THEN  You will DIE. 


Time’s Champion : 

Probably not. 

It's all a matter of Timing, 

don't you know. 


(The Doctor points 

The Sword to The Ground.)