Pennies and ha'pennies

Pennies From Heaven (BBC) is from that other great British TV writer of the late-20th century, Dennis Potter. This 1978 all-singing, all-dancing, dead-serious, six-episode drama was a bit of a mould-breaker in its time and still holds up pretty damned well. Bob Hoskins’s portrayal of a duplicitous sheet-music salesman made him a star and the series reawakened interest in a lot of the often wonderfully wicked old 30s songs to which the entire cast get to lip-sync. This risky technique of mixing harsh reality with winsome crooning reached its apex with the later Singing Detective, for which this is a kind of technical dry run. Not to say it’s a failed experiment – there are passages herein that equal anything Potter ever achieved.