Cold Lazarus

Cold Lazarus

Cold Lazarus is a television play written by Dennis Potter shortly before his death, and broadcast after it in 1994. It forms 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.

In a distant dystopian future, researchers study the cryonicallyally-preserved head of 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.