Play for Today - Joe's Ark (1974) by Dennis Potter & Alan Bridges

Play for Today - Joe's Ark (1974) by Dennis Potter & Alan Bridges

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.)