Who says it's g-g-g-g-good to be alive? Same ones who keep it a perpetual jive (I think Lester Meyers said that): the world is run by clowns who can't wait for it to end (Too Much Joy, they said that), but somehow they manage to make it last (Joey Ramone, yep, he said that). Well, if you're damned fatigued from swimming upstream in this River of Shit that seemingly flows forever--please don't make me be specific, where would I start?--you need to hustle your ass down to the nearest hip video store and check out all three volumes of the British TV series Lipstick On Your Collar, the 1993 swan song of Dennis Potter, a man who understood that rock and roll was good medicine for worldsick souls. Too much monkey business makes us all dull boys and girls; the fantasies encoded in a fine rock and roll song, as Lipstick's protagonists so vibrantly illustrate, are sometimes enough to get us up and over, or at least through seconds, minutes, and hours that seem like years. I said that.

The series tracks the progress of three characters in London in 1956: Sylvia Berry (Louise Germaine, who looks like she coulda walked right off a Crypt album cover), a wildcat usherette with glam dreams who's married to and wet-blanketed by a major asshole; Private Francis Francis (Giles Thomas, separated at birth from Brad "Billy Bibbit" Dourif ), a Pushkin-worshipping nebbish whose cross-threaded romantic dreams leads him into a pursuit of Mrs. Berry, who just happens to be married to his immediate superior officer; and Mick Hopper (Ewan McGregor), Francis' fellow soldier in the British War Office whose daydreams are definitively below the neck. They're all three surrounded by the walking dead: the soldiers by a bunch of older men devoted to a British Empire falling apart at the seams and a detailed routine of trivia that makes their denial easier to maintain, the usherette by the brutish lout and a creepy theatre organist she fucks for the money her husband won't give her.

But it's their rock and pop dreams that keep their souls alive. The soundtrack's coursing with great songs from the '50s, of course, but if you've never seen any of Potter's work (Pennies from Heaven and The Singing Detective I highly recommend), you've never heard these songs this way. They explode into the story, as characters interrupt soul-killing situations and launch into lip-synched fantasy production numbers that not only fascinatingly recontextualize the songs but articulate (and occasionally mock) the characters' dreams and desires. There's absolutely nothing in TV or film like these moments, and they leave Potter's previous experiments in the dust. What makes them more powerful than ever before is McGregor's total investment in each song he's involved in. Pardon my hyperbole, but no actor I've ever seen has nailed the "Gene Vincent 'Be-Bo-A-Lula'/'Woman Love' Drooling Rock and Roll Lust" look so squarely as McGregor does when each daydream dawns on his character's consciousness. And he acts out each song like he's hauling his first erection around. Ladies and gentlemen, this is rock and roll!

I could go on. The photography's vivid, the script is barbed and witty, the acting is terrific. But the reason you need to rent Lipstick On Your Collar is that soul-death is perhaps a more imminent danger than ever these days, and this series reminds us that a little ditty might just be a big enough weapon to hold it off until we catch ahold of our dreams and let 'em air-lift us out of this river. Even if the dream only exists in the little ditty; even if the dream's dreaming (or laughing at) us; even if the dream only provides a temporary blockade against the monkey business. A little bit is better than nada, the late great Sir Doug said that.