Seeing it - as I have just done - as a whole entity rather than over six weeks as it was transmitted originally - possibly lessens the impact, for example the central conceit which has characters miming to popular songs of the day at the drop of a downbeat may well have sustained a novelty value is seen just once a week but viewing two episodes a day for three days one begins to question what all the fuss was about. Apart from that the utilization of popular songs in non-musical stories isn't exactly new. Back in 1941 George Stevens directed Penny Serenade in which Cary Grant and Irene Dunn relived their meeting, courtship, marriage and separation in terms of the popular songs that punctuated their life together and whilst they didn't go so far as to mime to them the basic idea was firmly entrenched some 37 years before Potter wrote Pennies From Heaven. It seems equally clear that Potter was a fan of Irwin Shaw, who, in novel after novel explored the role that chance plays in human life. This runs through Potter's serial from the first episode when Arthur Parker (Bob Hoskins) picks up a vagrant, The Accordion Man (Kenneth Colley) and drops him in Gloucester. Later on another trip - he is a travelling salesman - he stops by the roadside to relieve himself in an adjacent field and encounters a blind girl, they exchange a few words and he goes on his way. The girl is later murdered - by, as it turns out, the Accordion Man - and Arthur is suspected. At the time of the murder he was calling on one of his clients in a music shop (Parker sells sheet music) BUT, because on a previous visit he had seen and been smitten by a female customer (Cheryl Campbell) he offers the shopkeeper one dozen copies of sheet music gratis in exchange for the girl's address; thus although he did have an alibi it is unprovable - by the time of his arrest the shop has changed hands and although the books have passed to the new owner there is no record of the previous owner purchasing anything on that day. Nor is that the only example of Chance affecting lives. The girl in question is a virginal schoolteacher until she is seduced and impregnated by Arthur, is fired from her job, leaves both home and the area, moves to London and becomes a prostitute. It's difficult to determine what Potter is trying to say other than Chance is not always a fine thing. The acting is of a fairly high standard if the period detail is sometimes a little strained. Maybe if I'd seen it over six weeks thirty years ago it might have impressed more.
Review of Pennies from Heaven
