...the BBC and Channel 4 spent £10.3 million on the production of Karaoke and Cold Lazarus, a far from small sum on two plays which critique the medium through which they were screened. Working from a Freudian standpoint, he argues that an unmitigated return of images from the unconscious in literature would negate its aesthetic qualities, rendering texts and plays unbearable to assimilate. ...the signs of any literary genre (the term 'sign' in this article includes the visual codes of film and the small screen) need to function as filtering devices for expressing contemporary cultural anxieties. The central visual code of the play, the disembodied head fed by tubes and external agencies, is a sign of passive acceptance of the matter being fed into it. ...one reading of the sign is as a warning to avoid such quiescent immobility of mind-set and to think independently in the way that Daniel, under desperate circumstances, strives to do. Since Potter's death in 1994, the mass television audiences for Reality TV and spin-off programmes from Big Brother confirm that in Cold Lazarus the plans of Masdon and Siltz to display private thoughts, feelings and fantasies as voyeuristic entertainment were, in 1994, a plausible projection into the future.