Pennies From Heaven

Recently I saw, to my delight, that the DVDs of the 1978 BBC TV series Pennies From Heaven were once again available. I immediately invested, via Amazon, and they duly arrived last week.

 

I’ve spent the last three nights reliving the glories of Dennis Potter’s creation, which was given magnificent life by the cast of Bob Hoskins, Cheryl Campbell, Gemma Craven, Kenneth Colley, Freddie Jones, Hywel Bennett and many others.

 

The story lasts over seven hours – something that probably wouldn’t be commissioned in these days of short attention spans – but is worth every moment.

Close your eyes, stand on one leg, and count to ten, very, very slowly… Perfect in every way.

 

Oh, and I can’t resist a bit of trivia: the exterior scenes of where Eileen comes to stay in London were shot in Bristol Gardens. The row of shops seen in the film are on one side of the street, and the house where Eileen stands in the window is on the other. The Royal George pub is at the bottom of the street. In Pennies From Heaven, the street is frequented by prostitutes, and I learned later that this was indeed the case in the 1930s when the drama was set.

 

This was the street where I lived during the late 1970s. At the time, it was very run down. I, and my best friend, put in an offer to buy an old terraced house in the street from the council. Many of the houses had been squatted. We paid the enormous sum for us at the time of £55,000 for a practically derelict house. I hear that a house in the same street recently changed hands for £5 million. How times change, but of course, some things never do.