In the 1993 television production Lipstick on Your Collar, screenwriter Dennis Potter foregrounds popular 1950s rock-and-roll hit songs, creating what he has called a “home-made musical.” Characters break out in song—but instead of singing, they move their mouths in synchrony with the voices of pop idols. A study of the effects of Potter's technique, with help from the literatures of opera and film theory and the history of ventriloquism, shows that the songs in Lipstick on Your Collar gain fresh meaning in their new context through the medium of lip-syncing, becoming spontaneous expressions of the characters' psychologies.