previously: An introduction
Okay, so right off the bat, we’re starting with an interesting one here.
Lipstick on Your Collar was a British mini-series consisting of six episodes. It originally aired on Channel 4 in 1993. It takes place during 1956 and centers on a small group of British Military Intelligence officers during the Suez Crisis.
As a dumb American, who maybe had the vaguest memory of what the Suez Crisis was from one of my three high school history classes, I’m already dismayed that I’m going to have to be doing homework to understand the context of what’s going on in this series.
For situations like this where Ewan McGregor is going to be in multiple episodes of a series, I plan to watch them one at a time and provide an update accordingly. With the last episode, I’ll give my thoughts overall. This is mostly because I’m notoriously bad at binge-watching, which does not bode well for completing this project in a timely manner, but that’s just the way it’s going to have to be.
This series was written and executive produced by Dennis Potter. I don’t know who that is. (See dumb American remark above.) But from my cursory research, he seems to have been a very beloved creative figure of British television.
Physical copies of this series are difficult to impossible to track down, and all the sold-out and/or overpriced listings I could find were for VHS tapes or Region 2 DVDs. And given my previous lack of success trying to track down British television shows that are less popular internationally than Doctor Who, which is basically all of them, I doubt Region 1 DVDs were manufactured at all. (I WILL watch Season 2 of The Goes Wrong Show someday.) Nor is it available streaming (legally) on any service. The only reason it seems to be readily available in any capacity is not because it was Ewan McGregor’s first credited role, but because Dennis Potter still has devoted fans thirty years after his death who are archiving his work. And I appreciate them, because it would have been real depressing to start this project off with having to skip over lost media from the year after I was born.
The opening credits of this series has three newcomers it’s “introducing,” and Ewan McGregor is the last one listed. He’s twenty-two here, and he already seems like a pro at this acting thing. But also, I was surprised at how young he looks here, he’s just a baby!
His character is Private Hopper, a Russian translator who is six weeks away from the end of his national service, and he would really appreciate it if this international crisis they’re on the brink of could hold off on tipping fully into war for at least six more weeks. He is deeply bored with his job, and deeply horny. He keeps slipping into musical fantasies, imagining naked women and his officers dancing and lip-synching to the hits of the day. I found these sequences bizarre and delightful, and I missed them when they went away about halfway through the episode. Also, again, I don’t really know how things work in Britain, but here in America, there’s generally a lot less nudity on public television.
The soundtrack is really great. The first time the camera zoomed in on Ewan, the music started, and he opened his mouth, I got my hopes up for about half a second that he might really sing. So far, though, it’s just lip-synching. Which is also really entertaining, but I wish so badly he would sing more. This is maybe the only time I’ve recognized The Platters and was subsequently kinda disappointed.
About halfway through the episode, focus shifts from Private Hopper to the new private in from the field who will be trading places with him, Francis. Francis is pathetic but also kind of adorable, and is much more of a romantic than Hopper. He started learning Russian because he wanted to be able to read Pushkin’s works in the original language they were composed in. As someone who’s attempting to teach herself French purely so she can someday read The Phantom of the Opera as Gaston Leroux wrote it, I felt an instant kinship with this dork and also fully understand just how much he does not belong in the military in any capacity.
Francis is staying with his aunt and uncle, and technically, their upstairs neighbors. He sees the woman who now lives above him and is instantly smitten. However, he misses seeing her abusive husband come home that evening, and as Francis considers intervening during a late-night fight between them, he recognizes the husband’s voice: It’s one of his new superior officers.
I enjoyed the first episode and I’m interested to see where this goes. So far, I’m picking up that this is a satire, positing that “military intelligence” is, as they say, an oxymoron. Apparently, this was inspired by the circumstances of Potter’s national service experience in the 1950s.
Like I said, this was an interesting one to start with. It just slammed me headfirst into fantasy musical sequences with nude women and an old English man piping up with a nonsensical racist joke with a full-on slur as the punchline. “Of course the attempted coup on Egypt failed and the British Empire fell,” the series seems to be telling me, “I mean, look at these idiots!”
I don’t expect anyone to seriously be following this project, and if they are, I don’t expect them to be watching along with me. But I do want to link a brief clip from the thing I’m talking about when I can. Especially in this case, when the experience of going into this series knowing nothing about it is extremely hard to describe.
Will context for the following clip help? I’ll give it a shot.
Private Hopper has just been asked to make everyone else coffee, like he’s a woman or something. I think that’s the reason this scene is here. This is taking place in his head, and I assume it’s because he feels demeaned, like they’re treating him like he’s their bitch because he’s the lowest rank. So please enjoy this fantasy/nightmare dark comedy musical sequence of him being sexually harassed by his superiors.
Ewan Me: The Project Where I Chronicle My Attempt to Watch Every Entry of Ewan McGregor's Filmography to See If I Can 