"So he emerges," author David Thomson wrote of the late Dennis Potter, "as some kind of sprite or devil, from out of the woods ..."
Potter, certainly the greatest writer ever to take television drama as his primary medium, was born in the Royal Forest of Dean, two hours west of London. It is one of England's oldest surviving woodlands; for many years, the region was also a major source of coal and ore. Potter found his great themes there: the bucolic set against the commercial, the gold dust of dreams mingling with the soot of social determinism. His characters lead double lives in the forests of imagination and the factory towns of reality; his is a world where either a pixie or a beast might spring from the dark.
"Potter," Thomson believed, "is intent on getting us back into his woods." Luring us back, he might have said, with a song. Pennies fromHeaven -- the six-part, eight-hour series Potter wrote for the BBC in 1978, just issued on DVD (Warner Home Video) -- is seductively strange and overwhelmingly sad. Memory mansion and enchanted forest, in which fragments of culture, history, politics, and imagined lives crossbreed, it is unlike anything else. (That includes the lavish 1982 M-G-M version, which, despite being among the best American movies of the time, was inevitably a reduction of something irreducible.)
Arthur (Bob Hoskins) is a sheet-music salesman traveling the byways between Gloucester and London. He believes in his product: the popular croons and dance-band diversions of 1935. Kept uneasy by a frigid wife (Gemma Craven) and his own yearnings, Arthur escapes into the songs, period recordings of which play as he mouths the lyrics and moves to the music. He fancies that everyone else does this too: his wife, his salesman cronies, the cops, prostitutes, and wastrels who cross his vision-- even a derelict wraith called The Accordion Man (Kenneth Colley), who plays hymns on street corners between epileptic fits and haunts the story as Arthur's stuttering, tormented shadow.
From out of the Forest of Dean comes Arthur's ideal, Eileen (Cheryl Campbell), a virginal schoolteacher with a naughty mind. When they first meet, he is transfixed by lust; she is held by fear and excitement. Only the songs from their mouths tell us what each really wants. Soon enough their fates are sealed: From this modest, not unwholesome beginning will come rape, murder, bouts of prostitution, incipient insanity, coerced exhibitionism, more murder, a trial, and an execution.
Nothing here is what it seems. This is England, decent, reticent country of rolling glens and cottage suburbs, in the early '30s -- when Oswald Mosley's homegrown fascism is on the rise, when Nazis might still be spoken of with regard for their better qualities, when a young man can confidently predict to Arthur that the next war will be against the Americans ("They're taking over"). A place where a lonely housewife can sing "Blue Moon" and imagine stabbing her husband to death, then dancing on his casket; where that same husband can candidly say: "I'm a blank. There's nothing" -- tapping his chest -- "here." Where The Accordion Man does a ghost dance amid the zombie habitues of a roadside diner, and where Arthur, on the run from the law, performs a surrealist pas de deux with an ambulatory haystack. Domestic pathology and popular music, sexual frustration and creeping fascism, homelessness and heartlessness as persistent human conditions: Echoes cross echoes and create new echoes. It's a strange world.
Meanwhile the ordinary folk toil on between the legs and beneath the shadow of history as it looms. But everyone in this world is a dreamer; everyone has a fantasy self and a song that expresses it. That is, everyone is in pain or is inflicting it on others. Potter acknowledges his dreamers' selfishness, but extends tenderness and insight to even his most wretched creations. Thus, a monstrous, provincial headmaster turns out to be a broken-hearted, broken-spirited man who sees the breaking of infantile hearts and spirits as his unsavory duty to Empire and Industry. And thus The Accordion Man, prisoner of poverty and madness, proves to be the sole character of sufficient conscience to willingly pay the final price for his crimes.
Potter suffered from psoriasis and a virulent form of arthritis that twisted his fingers into fleshy slipknots; he died, in 1994, from pancreatic cancer. (A cancer which, it's said, the devout socialist, anti-Thatcherite, and one-time Labour candidate nicknamed Rupert -- as in Murdoch.) Far from embittered, Potter had a deep and sap-free compassion for his characters, who consistently turn out to be something more -- though not anything happier -- than they appear.
Potter's most direct and innovative melding of all this pain, history, and fantasy into immediate expression is, of course, the lip-synching of pop tunes. Only in these moments of spontaneous song and dance do his characters quiet the echoes in and around them, transcend the compromises they've made, and settle the impossibilities of private and public life. In these moments the grim detective admits sensitivity, the drunk imagines himself grand, the frigid glories in physical desire.
Arthur, our horny hero, is the most complex. His musical interludes reveal one part of him but conceal another. Arthur is a sexual revolutionary out of his time; both his drives and his words make it clear that his sense of personal romance and social right is tied in with a radical desire for free physical expression. But he is also an amoral hole of hunger, nearly deranged by his appetites, and his cloaking of phallic lust in the coy frills of the romantic is, in more ways than one, what does him in. Potter's awful truth: The dreamer may be selfish and cowardly, and his dream may lead everyone to hell. Geniuses get away with elevating their dreams past anyone else's ordinary need, because they at least leave their works behind; non-geniuses like Arthur go to the gallows, because they leave only their trail of failures and ruined lives.
But the best of Arthur is in his deep and desperate love of music. If only he could live there forever, he and we would be safe. And more than anywhere else, it's in his musical asides that one begins to have love for Bob Hoskins, the rawness and gallantry of his performance. Such awe in his face as he mimes words like, "Fancy our meeting / When days are so fleeting . . . " The cute rhyme, the facile words are suddenly coldly, fearsomely significant -- as heard through Potter's echoing memory context, and as embodied by Hoskins, his hands parting the air before him like Astaire in a deco ballroom. You could weep to see such nakedness in an actor, and shudder at how depth has been opened in what you had thought was a meaningless entertainment, a trivial tune -- which, a second later, it goes back to being.
If I may: The most haunting moment in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining comes at the end, as the camera tracks toward a photograph that will explain everything that has happened -- or that at least suggests it might, if looked at in the right way. The music complementing this ghostly glide through an empty corridor is an echoing rendition of "Midnight, the Stars and You" by Ray Noble and His Orchestra, with a vocal by Al Bowlly. Pennies from Heaven uses several songs featuring Bowlly; and an early Potter teleplay, the 1969 Moonlight on the Highway, was about a man's obsessive devotion to the obscure crooner, who was killed in a London bombing raid in 1941.
The connection here -- two films using the same singer's voice as a double echo, a ghost calling forth other ghosts -- is less than a profundity, but more than a parlor game. Coincidence is nothing but two facts crossing and parting, never to cross again -- but leaving ripples of doubt behind, the doubt that anything is, or ever has been, quite what it seems. "Fancy our meeting:" the coalescence of social, cultural, and personal histories woven through Pennies from Heaven is no more important or any less miraculous than that.
And because Dennis Potter's imaginative forest is so vast and dark, its resonances so varied and rich, it's easy to forget that Pennies from Heaven takes its final, disastrous turn upon one very small and exact event: a murder along a quiet wooded path. A murder which Arthur is accused and found guilty of, which sends him to his death, and which we are informed occurred on May 17, 1935 -- the day Dennis Potter himself was born, to a coalminer's family, deep in the Forest of Dean.
Devin McKinney is a freelance writer and author of Magic Circles: The Beatles in Dream and History (Harvard). He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
