One of the most ambitious personal statements ever produced for television, Pennies from Heaven is an extraordinarily vivid epic about a Cockney sheet-music salesman and his ill-fated yearnings for love and romance during the Depression years. Potter makes powerful and resonant use of pop culture as a redemptive, spirit-infusing force: for the characters in Pennies from Heaven, songs, fairy tales and even radio commercials irresistibly articulate their most secret needs and aspirations. Arthur Parker (played with earthy jubilance by Bob Hoskins), an ambitious failure of a salesman, explains the root truth of the songs he sells: "There's things too big and too important and too bleeding simple to put in all that la-de-da poetry and books. But everybody knows it. They know it when the dance comes along." When Arthur and the other characters in Pennies give expression to their deepest desires and feelings, they break into song, or rather into lip-syncing the original renditions of such tunes as "Blue Moon" and "Smoke Gets In Your Eyes." (Potter uses more than sixty songs of the period.) Pennies from Heaven is a stark but never mean-spirited portrait of England's working class. And Arthur, as a sort of singing Everyman, captures a haunted striving for respite beyond the gloom of the workaday world. Arthur's particular haven is to be found in his belief in the purifying power of sexuality, and Pennies from Heaven contains some of the most erotic scenes ever televised. Over six episodes, Arthur fails at his business, ruins his marriage to an unfeeling wife, abandons the woman of his dreams, and is arrested for murder-yet still believes that life can be like a song.