Karaoke

0 Comments | Insight on the News, August 19, 1996 | by Rex Roberts

The TV museum is screening the last works of Dennis Potter -- TV's 'first fully developed auteur.'

Aside from speeches by Steven Spielberg praising the primacy of the word, scriptwriters rarely receive the recognition they deserve. S.J. Perelman and Herman Mankiewicz are remembered for witty repartee. Neil Simon and Paddy Chayevsky, who won Oscars for Marty, Hospital and Network, may be said to have oeuvres. But for the most part, filmgoers pay attention to filmmakers-directors like Orson Welles and Francis Ford Coppola who also write or collaborate on scripts.

How ironic, then, that one of the most original and provocative writers of this century chose to work in television, a medium even further down the aesthetic ladder than film and universally assailed by cultural pundits on the right and left.

British writer Dennis Potter is relatively unknown in the United States. His signature works, The Singing Detective (1986) starring Michael Gambon and Pennies from Heaven (1978) with Bob Hoskins, have aired on American public television, but both are six-part series that require commitment. (Hollywood turned Pennies from Heaven into a feature film starring Steve Martin and Bernadette Peters.) Potter's complex narratives compress the past and present, and his protagonists are dreamers whose fantasies interrupt the story in bizarre ways-often in the form of elaborate production numbers in which characters lip-synch popular songs.

But BBC audiences have embraced or reviled Potter from his first teleplay, Vote, Vote, Votefor Nigel Barton (1965), based upon his experience running for Parliament as a Labour candidate. He went on to write more than 30 works for the BBC and its competitor, Channel 4, including the controversial Son of Man (1969), in which Jesus struggles with doubts of his divinity and Brimstone and Treacle (1976j, in which the devil rapes a disabled girl. In April 1994 Potter was interviewed on British television after he was diagnosed with cancer, declaiming on God, politics and art as he sipped morphine to dull the pain. He died two months later at age 59.

During that now-famous interview, Potter expressed a dying wish -- that the two dramas he was writing Karaoke for the BBC and Cold Lazarus for Channel 4, would be produced in tandem as an eight-part series that would serve as his epitaph. "All I hope is that I've enough days to finish it," he said. "I could go out with a fitting memorial."

Remarkably -- or maybe not considering Potter's extraordinary career -- executives at both corporations agreed to the scheme. Potter reworked his material and finished the teleplays, which were produced after his death by his longtime collaborators Kenith Todd and Rosemarie Whitman and directed by Renny Rye. Karaoke debuted on BBC in April this year and Cold Lazarus followed in May. The dramas had their American premier in June at the Museum of Television and Radio in New York, where they will play through October. (Westerners can see the films at the museum's Los Angeles branch.)

The films are by turns maudlin and disturbing, tedious and brilliant -- they are not Potter's best work, nor are they good windows into his world despite that they are unabashedly autobiographical. Karaoke chronicles three fateful days in the waning life of Daniel Feeld (Albert Finney), a sodden television writer suffering severe stomach cramps. Perhaps it's the booze or the pain, but Feeld keeps overhearing strangers speaking lines from his latest script, also called Karaoke. He becomes obsessed with one of those strangers, a hostess (Saffron Burrows) in a karaoke bar in London's Soho, whose life indeed resembles that of a character in his script. And so on-Potter may have had little time to plot his work, but he managed to layer story upon story upon story, one of his gifts.

In fact, several subplots jump the reel into Cold Lazarus, in which Feeld returns as a frozen head preserved in a cryogenic lab. It's the year 2368, and media mogul David Siltz (Henry Goodman) wants to package Feeld's recovered memories as a television program. The evil entrepreneur hopes to distract his autonomic audience from anxieties about a terrorist organization known as RON-Reality or Nothing. And he is especially interested in Feeld's recollections of his first love, an innocent country girl who becomes confused in the writer's awakening mind with the hostess in the karaoke bar and characters in his scripts.

Those who know Potter's films will recognize familiar themes, especially his obsession with memory -- the longing for a past that never was (or a future that might have been). For a writer of popular entertainments who embraced television as the most democratic medium, Potter tackled the big issues -- good and evil, consciousness, God -- and the little ones, too -- lust, greed, courage, compassion. For him, this wasn't the stuff of philosophical speculation but fodder for old-fashioned pulp fiction.

Unfortunately, Potter allows his alter ego in Karaoke too many sentimental speeches toward the end of the drama-not even the irascible Finney can do much with these elegies. Cold Lazarus is weighed down by the implausibility of the underlying conceit. The British, who recreate the past on celluloid amazingly well fail miserably when they look into the future.