Pennies from Heaven, Dennis Potter’s groundbreaking 1978 television series about a travelling sheet music-seller of the 1930s, featured Bob Hoskins in daydreaming scenes where he lip-synced to popular songs of the time. Ken Westbury’s cinematography, particularly his use of light, was instrumental in giving those sequences a surreal, dreamlike quality that provided the fantasy element into which the drama – and the character – could escape from reality.
Westbury, who has died of skin cancer aged 96, became a film camera operator and director of photography in television after a grounding in cinema at Ealing Studios on classic comedies such as Whisky Galore! and Kind Hearts and Coronets (both 1949).
