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The Singing Detective, probably because it relied on so many unusually personal details, established Potter as an intriguing personality in the States. However, he had been working as a writer since the 60s in the UK.
The Last Interview is particularly compelling as a quirky statement; a summation of Potter's approach to death from cancer. While so many books and tapes encourage victims and their relatives to embrace holistic medicine, fastidious dietary habits and Zen-like calm, this interview exclaims "The hell with it all!" instead.
There are no cuts or laundered takes during the whole 70 minutes, and one can only hope that the interview stays the way it's presented in the screener. The feel is much like Derek Jarman's Blue, since the spaces left for commercial breaks are silent and black until the Channel Four station countdown begins. This recreates the tension of the original show, broadcast just weeks before Potter followed his wife (who had also succumbed to cancer a few years earlier) to the grave.
Sipping champagne and chain-smoking, Potter explored his own emotional reality, his professional history and his hopes for the near future. At times his pain would force him to ask his host to uncap a nearby flask of liquid morphine, which he would grasp in one psoriatic hand and swig unapologetically, on-camera.
"I've named my pancreatic cancer Rupert, so I can get close to it," Potter announced, as a way of launching into an elaborate yet impromptu satire on Rupert Murdoch's journalism, mass media, politics, nationalism, sex, death and human feeling.
Potter was, at the time, racing to finish what he knew would be his televisual epitaph, Cold Lazarus. As the author described the premise, the script would involve a cryogenically defrosted human head, whose memories become tapped as part of a hit TV show. Once the head realizes his predicament, he demands to be allowed to die -- only to be told he's been permanently subsumed into the entertainment industry, and no one will risk cancelling his show!