I remember first watching this series back in 1996 and immediately being struck by the originality of Dennis Potter's idea about raiding a person's memory and using it as the ultimate form of television entertainment. Now, rewatching it 25 years later, I can't help but think that if Mr Potter were only alive today to see today's ever-growing fascination with reality TV, he could justifiably say "I told you so".
It can't be stressed enough that viewers to this four-part series really must watch its predecessor "Karaoke", set in the present-day and establishing the central character of Albert Finney's troubled Daniel Feeld, a writer suffering with health problems. As he approaches his end, we learn that he has devoted a large portion of his personal fortune to a medical organisation specialising in cryogenics. At the time, that minor detail just seemed like an oddity, but it becomes in this series the fulcrum of the succeeding story as we see his disembodied head still functioning neurologically in a cryolab sone 400 years later. A small team of scientists led by Frances De La Tour's Professor Purlock and prominently including a rebellious Slav doctor played by Ciaran Hinds have found the means to unlock and indeed visualise Feeld's old memories but given that the work is funded by a harridan megalomaniac Martina Masdon, played by Diane Ladd, who watches every penny spent by the lab, at least when she's not indulging her sexual needs with dimwitted scantily-dressed young hunks, the question arises as to whether she will continue to bankroll their expensive research.
Also interested in Feeld's memories is sleazy American media-baron, the appropriately-named David Siltz, played with grubby elan by Tony Goodman, who sees the commercial possibilities in packaging Feeld's subconscious recollections into TV entertainment and will stop at nothing to get his way. So we see him schmooze Masdon, bribe Purlock with the promise of unlimited funding and personal gain for her and her team, use his influence with the head of police and even torture one of Purlock's team to procure an "inside man", all in the name of TV ratings.
It becomes clear that Feeld's memories reveal a deeply disturbed childhood involving a lurid episode of child abuse. We then get glimpses of happier episodes in the growing Feeld's life including a romantic episode with a pretty young Welsh girl while at college, but most of the memories take us back to key moments in the "Karaoke" series which serve to both signpost and inform this later narrative. This is all played out to a background of (sorry, couldn't help using the word) a dystopian world where a protest group called Reality or Nothing is using guerrilla tactics to try to roll back the creep of computerisation overtaking humanity.
Potter perhaps uses a big hammer at times to chip away at his chosen targets like medical ethics, the dehumanisation of daily life and of course exploitation TV but the central story of the battle for Daniel Feeld's soul drives the work and makes for a compelling sci-fi thriller. Considering the obvious budget restrictions of British TV, I think the future-age production is well realised. I liked the way that Feeld's memories are shown as being almost dream-like and there were nice predictors of the future too in terms of communication, food-production and transport devices, where it looks to me like Potter anticipated satellite navigation for one thing.
I did perhaps feel that the characterisation of such obvious monsters as Masdon and Siltz fell too often into caricaturisation but came away from my combined eight-hours of viewing the life and afterlife of Daniel Feeld over these two well-directed and well-acted series with a still higher appreciation of the talent of Dennis Potter and a kind of satisfaction that unlike say, Dickens or F Scott Fitzgerald, he managed to complete his final work before his death.
