ABSTRACT
Dennis Potter's last TV-series, Cold Lazarus, tells how the deep-frozen brain of a TV-writer - a thinly veiled Potter himself- is reactivated after 300 years. His brain begins to produce visual memories, which are the object of both scientific and commercial interest: a group of scientists debates them and a ruthless TV mogul plans to broadcast them as the ultimate 'reality TV'. The point of the series is that the activating of memories demands conscious participation from the brain, although the scientists presume that it has no will of its own. In fact, the memory work recreates the personality of the writer. Bertrand Russell described memorably in his autobiography how happy he was when he finally could believe that tables or houses really existed and were not just imaginary constructs. The false memory debate is an extreme example of the problem of the trustworthiness and reality of life stories as a whole.
