The Curious Prescience of Dennis Potter

A Random Thought

In 1996, the BBC aired Dennis Potter’s final screenplays, a diptych Karaoke/Cold Lazarus. This is the plot of Cold Lazarus (Wikipedia summary):

Cold Lazarus is set in the 24th century, in a dystopian Britain where the ruined streets are unsafe, and where society is run by American oligarchs in charge of powerful commercial corporations. Experiences are almost all virtual, and anything deemed authentic (such as coffee and cigarettes) has either been banned or replaced by synthetic substitutes.

The fate of coffee is yet to be seen but I’m wondering whether, as vaping and the replacement of experience by simulacra have anticipated this future by three centuries or so, what is about to happen in America might also bring forward the kind of society Potter feared by a similar span of time ... admitting too, of course, that successful dystopian fiction is never really about the future but the present.

Cold Lazarus isn’t easy to find any more (it’s on Apple TV in Britain still, but that’s no use to the rest of us, especially in the US where it’s needed right now). The first episode though is on YouTube:

and I’m hoping someone is alert enough to the signs of its renewed relevance to load the other three.

What Cold Lazarus suggests to me is that Trump’s reaching deep into the barrels of incompetence isn’t, as it’s easy enough to suspect, just about infesting the US administration  – Project 2025 style – with lunatic ideologues who’ll make it impossible for any kind of sane and effective policy to emerge for a generation; but to wreck the whole business of government in order for business ultimately to replace government and plumb its workings for profit. And there will be few surprises as to which oligarchs and what corporations will fill the vacuum.

I don’t think there’s anything particularly conspiratorial to this, other than through inadvertence, since Trump is too stupid to conceive of any plan that might take more than 24 hours to complete. But the possibility may not have escaped some of the éminences grises (which I translate, perhaps a little loosely, as greasy eminences) in his circle like the Himmler wannabe, the oleaginous Stephen Miller or the self-basting Steve Bannon, who can’t really disguise his general oiliness by the appearance that it’s confined to his hair. And I suppose that if that adolescent eX-financial genius Musk realises he’s an accidental cog in this great unworking he’ll happily lay claim to the idea and to whatever corporatised bit of government he stumbles into at whatever loss he incurs. Swings and roundabouts after all.

A footnote: One of the oligarchs and greasiest of all American eminences who will, naturally, be expecting his (major) share in the impending government by business is Rupert Murdoch. Dennis Potter loathed Murdoch so much that he named the cancer that would kill him Rupert. It is one of the great ironies of an indifferent universe that Potter, one, perhaps the greatest of English writers for television, was dead before he was 60 while Murdoch continues even now to metastasize at age 153 or whatever he is.