[In the following review, Weldon looks at the gender issues raised in Karaoke and Cold Lazarus, and evaluates the merit of these plays.]

I watched four Potter Karaokes and Cold Lazaruses, at one sitting, and was, let me declare myself at once, absorbed, moved and exhilarated by the experience. Glued, as they say (or used to say when such things were more common), to the set. Writers' television once again.

What a relief. The technology serving the words on the page; actors obedient and trusting; producer and director as the writer's servants, not masters, not uppity, claiming moral authorship. A return to the old days, the opening years of the television age, when the box in the corner was seen as the key to social reform, personal enlightenment, and, believe it or not, the refreshment of the soul.

Took Potter's death to do it: as in his stage play Son of Man (1969), Jesus, that bolshie shop steward, has to die nastily and publicly to get a fairer deal for mankind. And how both stage-managed their own deaths …

Potter's narcissism was outrageous, his vanity noticeable, the contents of his head not overly likable, his distaste for the flesh quite horrible, his attitude to women neurotic to a degree, but what the hell—he was funny, bitter and alive—and the bitter liveliness has merely been exacerbated by the ironies of his death.

Now there's immortality for you. Potter offers us his head—wittily and literally in Cold Lazarus, frozen and detached in cryogenic suspension, 400 years in the future, still open for inspection—and it does not behove us to be ungrateful. But nor does it behove us to mince words.

Potter's attitude to women can only strike the contemporary viewer as antiquated, or at any rate—so long, long ago that decade seems in gender terms—stuck in the 1960s. Potter remained hopelessly unreconstructed, the most unnew of men; forever prey to that dreadful sexual anxiety, common in so many men over 50, who were determined to see women not as fully human, but existing as the object of desire. It opened such men up to dreadful humiliations.

Bluntly, to be a man at the mercy of a penis not fully under his control, which would rise, not where he admired, liked or trusted, but where he lusted, is no happy thing for a man. It rose when presented with a young female without brain, but fell if presented with a female of equal or greater intelligence, and that was the honest truth of it, and why should Potter, or we, tell it differently? And are we so sure this has changed?

The women in Karaoke, being the products of Potter's particular gender imagination, are enough to make a feminist writhe. Sandra Sollars is the 22-year-old bar-girl with whom the ageing writer, Feeld, in the TV play within the TV play, falls in love. Sandra is six foot two, uneducated, naive, badly spoken, working-class, kind and petulant by turns, and can't understand the long words our hero uses. At which he just laughs and finds her the more endearing. She is the taught, he—when he is sober enough—the teacher: she the victim, he the saviour and comforter. She blesses him just by existing.

But careful! Sandra has an alter ego. Linda, another girl with no brain and long legs, with whom the director of the play within the play is obsessed. But this time the child-girl is not in danger but the source of danger: Linda takes advantage of her lover's married vulnerability; she does her best to blackmail him, destroy him. Detumescence is instant.

Anna, the producer of the play within the play, middle-class, educated, described by all the men around as a pain in the arse, is unable to cope, hopelessly neurotic, laughed at by everyone and fancied by no one. This, in Potterland, is the penalty paid by Women Who Aspire. Out of the running, in a race only men can win.

The middle-aged wife of the faithless director is made to suffer the humiliation—often enough experienced by the womenfolk of the over-fifties in real life—of being told by her husband that for a time he fancied someone younger and fresher than she—but it's over now. In Potterland, man has his fling but keeps his wife. It is his due.

In Cold Lazarus, 400 years hence, the world is run by nasty, sexually voracious, face-lifted matrons with obedient toyboys, who speak the cost-cutting language of BBC management, spattered by foul language. And though we are given as an antidote Professor Emma Porlock, an effective, dedicated and intelligent scientist, albeit renowned as a fearful bully, she turns out to be cruel beyond belief to our writer, in her insistence that he relive his childhood traumas for the benefit of science. (Potter chose to do it in his plays: here he is without choice—unless, unless he has invented her and the whole caboodle simply to do it again.)

But at least the professor is beyond the menopause, and so not going to make anyone sexually anxious. Emma utters the plangent line, when proposing to go out alone to lunch with a powerful man: "Don't worry. He's not going to rape me. Alas."

Ah, Potter's Emma knows where her bread is buttered, or was, until age put a stop to it. Rape is better than no sex at all, which leaves MEN ON TOP.

I am merely observing, not complaining. I enjoy this glimpse of gender's past. Balance and maturity is what you hope to find in a BBC documentary, not in drama.

If we go on as we are, with our politically and emotionally correct, well-behaved, committee-built, unvisionary dramas, with their tedious theme of strong women, noble ethnics and designated victims, we will all switch off yawning, and TV drama will die with a whimper of fading police sirens and gurgling saline drips.

The posthumous Potter plays, brilliant, imperfect, tricksy, unreformed and neurotic, give TV drama a shot in the arm which might even enable it to get up off its deathbed and walk.