Two turbulent decades are the backdrop for personal stories in Stephen Poliakoff's latest TV work, he tells Daphne Lockyer.

by Daphne Lockyer, The Times The Knowledge Magazine, January 14, 2006

Like a lot of brilliant people, Stephen Poliakoff favours the unkempt look. At first sight, indeed, you might mistake him for a man who sells The Big Issue rather than a writer-director who deals with them (big issues, that is) in groundbreaking TV dramas.

Today, on location for Friends And Crocodiles, the first of two eagerly anticipated plays for the BBC, he seems particularly wild of hair, shaggy of beard, crumpled of clothing. Rasputin meets Rumpelstiltskin. He's a small, twitchy guy wearing glasses with lenses so murky you are tempted to trace CLEAN ME across them. But, then, giving them a wipe is low on his list of priorities.

High on that list, however, is nailing the action in Friends And Crocodiles in precisely the way that he wants it. To this end, he paces the floor while thinking, peers intently into the camera. All the while, he is never without a plastic drinking straw that he fiddles with and chews to death as an aid to concentration. On Radio 4's Desert Island Discs, he cited a box of plastic drinking straws as his luxury.

"Stephen is barking mad, of course," says Robert Lindsay, who plays the social diarist and commentator William Sneath, the only character to straddle both Friends And Crocodiles and its "sister" drama, Gideon's Daughter. "But I love him dearly and with the madness comes a real brilliance. You think of Dennis Potter, Tom Stoppard, Alan Bleasdale and Stephen Poliakoff; he's one of a select band of writers who have elevated TV drama to an art-form."

In an age of wall-to-wall popcorn drama, reality TV and soap opera, Poliakoff stands alone as the last genuine auteur in the medium of TV, given the room to express his vision. Though he has also worked for stage and cinema, it is on the small screen that he has produced his most passionate, successful dramas: Shooting The Past, for example, the tale of a ruthless property developer attempting to bulldoze a precious British photo archive; Perfect Strangers, set at a large Jewish family reunion; and The Lost Prince, the true story of Prince John, the severely epileptic son of King George V and Queen Mary who was hidden from public view until his death, at the age of 13.

"What Stephen does is to take some very big themes -- history, politics, memory, family -- and make them feel intensely personal," Lindsay says. Friends And Crocodiles is a sweeping two-hour drama set against the backdrop of the rapidly changing business and social worlds of the 1980s and 1990s. But at its heart, it is also a moving story about the friendship of two central characters, Paul (played by Damian Lewis) and Lizzie (Jodhi May).

Poliakoff explains: "When we first meet them, Paul is a successful, hedonistic, millionaire property tycoon who lives a Gatsby-esque life, with a country pile and beautiful gardens in which he throws parties for an eclectic mix of interesting friends.

"He poaches Lizzie from the local estate agents to be his PA and, though her practical, down-to-earth approach is at odds with his maverick ways, each character has something the other lacks and they are inexorably drawn to each other -- but not in a sexual way.

"For a long time now I've wanted to write something about a male-female relationship in which sex is not an issue, although, dramatically, that's quite a risk. When you put two strong characters played by charismatic actors together, the audience usually wills them to get together. But here I wanted to show that, often, the people who have the most impact on our lives are the ones we work with, and they may haunt us in ways that no ex-lover could.

"In my own life there are people that I met, especially early on, who had a deep influence on me and, even if I haven't seen them for years, I still find myself wondering, 'What would they think?' Our connection to certain colleagues is often extremely powerful. Overwhelmingly so, in the case of Paul and Lizzie."

During the 20-year span of the drama, they meet and separate and try to work together on a succession of variously successful business projects. Lizzie's ambitious pragmatism makes her ideally suited to the spirit of Thatcher's 1980s, and she rises in the ranks. Paul's more eccentric, inspirational approach ensures his descent. "And, on one level, the drama is actually a very simple story about one character who is on the way up, meeting another who is on the way down," Poliakoff says.

We are talking during a break in filming one of the scenes from the final act of the drama in which Lizzie has risen to the top in a huge corporation (think of, say, Marconi). Having been a conglomerate of more old-fashioned industries, it has leaped into the telecoms boom with disastrous results, and is facing ruin. The Freemasons' Hall in Covent Garden, with its Art Deco architecture, mosaic ceilings and stained-glass windows, has been chosen by Poliakoff to embody old-world values in collision with the new -- one of the recurrent themes in his dramas. "But, also, a lot of big companies like Unilever took over these great 1920s buildings. I wanted to emulate that."

Poliakoff researches all the locations himself. But, then, he more or less does everything else, too. "I am lucky that I have very little interference when I am working. I write these wacky dramas, get the best actors to appear in them and then direct them, too. I fight for the budget, I'm involved in editing and selecting the music, which is crucial to my work. So I see myself a bit like someone who hand-builds a car in an age of mass production. It's very time-consuming, but I wouldn't know how else to work."

Yet he still pulls in big audiences. "My view has always been that we wildly underestimate the intelligence of viewers and imagine they can only deal with simple ideas in half-hour segments. And really that is rubbish," he says.

"For me the excitement of TV is being able to bring my work -- which would play to three people if I were making it for cinema -- to a mass audience and to give them something that will challenge them and stay with them the next day.

"I try to produce dramas that engage both their minds and the emotions and when you succeed in this a very wide audience will stay committed to what they're watching."

While there is a nostalgic fascination in Poliakoff's take on the 1980s and 1990s -- with shoulder pads, big hair and brick-sized mobile phones -- it also tackles more cerebral issues.

"I'm fascinated by that period because it was an era of seismic change. We saw the end of consensus politics in Britain, the rise of technology, the growing importance of market research to second-guess the future. It was an era governed by the fear of chaos and that is what underpinned Thatcherism. Fear of chaos meant that unions must be crushed and every major institution from newspapers to hospitals and museums centralised control and stamped out the unpredictable, the maverick, the inspirational.

"Socially, too, huge changes were afoot. I've been watching news bulletins and documentaries from that time and, though it's only 20 years ago, every presenter sounds like something off Brief Encounter. Power and success had been for those with plummy voices, but that was changing and the young were seizing power from their elders, too. Before, you worked your way up and older people told you what to do, but in the 1980s technology and money changed all that and that's something I don't think anyone has written about. But I didn't want Friends And Crocodiles to come across as a history lesson. I wanted a drama that would move people."

Poliakoff is, by his own admission, a highly emotional writer. Aged 53, he is one of four siblings born to an English mother, Ina, and a Russian father, Alex. Alex and his well-to-do Jewish family fled Moscow in 1924 when Stalin came to power. Poliakoff was raised in England but inherited his father's emotional flamboyance. His Russian genes show most, he says, in his desire to affect and move his audience. "If drama doesn't accomplish this, what's the point of it?"

He is generous in his writing -- more so than in his interviews -- with personal experience. Perfect Strangers, for example, was based on his own recollections of large Jewish family reunions. "But Gideon's Daughter, which follows Friends And Crocodiles, is by far the most personal drama that I have written so far."

In this second drama, to be shown next month, Poliakoff returns to his favoured theme of family. The drama begins in the intense summer of 1997, when Labour was elected and the Princess of Wales died, and is the tale of a hugely successful PR guru (played by Bill Nighy) who realises that he has put career before life and is suffering disenchantment.

"The drama is also very much about the relationship that he has with his daughter (played by Emily Blunt). She is planning to go off travelling to Colombia and he simply can't deal with this.

"Through this relationship I wanted to explore the terrible fears that we have for our children as parents, especially since 9/11. The world now seems such a terrifying place."

Poliakoff is husband to the writer Sandy Welch and father to a 14-year-old son and 20-year-old daughter. "When your children leave and go off to university, as my daughter did, it's a huge rite of passage and there is a kind of grief about it. I have never dealt with this area in my dramas before, but it is a very rich vein."

Friends And Crocodiles and Gideon's Daughter, he says, are linked only tenuously. "I think of them as sister dramas. Taken together, I suppose they add up to a study of how we have arrived where we are at this moment in our history."

Already, he is working on a third drama that he hopes to start filming next summer. "If the first two are brother and sister, this one will be a distant cousin," he says. He is not yet prepared to discuss details ... plot, character, possible casting. "But, hopefully, there is enough to be getting on with in the first two dramas," he cackles affably before returning to the business of filming.

More than enough, of course. As usual.

Friends And Crocodiles, Sunday, BBC One, 9 pm; Gideon's Daughter will be broadcast in late February.

Damian Lewis On Playing Paul Reynolds

The Times The Knowledge Magazine, January 14, 2006

"I admired Stephen's work long before I worked on Friends And Crocodiles. He has a completely individual voice and tackles such ambitious themes. He also has tremendous visual flair. There are always a handful of moments that are eccentrically poetic. In fact, for me, the first 40 minutes of Friends And Crocodiles has a beautiful, haunting, dream-like quality.

"It's here that we're introduced to my character, Paul. Stephen decided I could play this rather hedonistic, indulgent guy after he met me at a party given by Cherie Blair. That might worry me except that, despite the decadence, he's an ambiguous man who remains more true to himself than any other character.

"At one point we see him in bed with two women. But, as the drama unfolds he also 'marries' two women, one of whom is disabled. He has children with both and is a great father. In many ways he is at the moral centre of the piece. But, then, one of the strengths of Stephen's writing is that he produces characters who are flawed and magnificent by turns.

"Only someone like Stephen could deal with the sophisticated dynamic of a relationship in which the guy not only doesn't get the girl but doesn't even flirt with the idea of getting her. You see the story on paper and think, 'It's about history, politics and a 20-year platonic relationship. How's that going to work? But people are surprised by how moved they are by the end of the drama."

Jodhi May On Playing Lizzie Thomas

The Times The Knowledge Magazine, January 14, 2006

"My character is a working-class girl made good. She's ambitious, fearless and determined. In many ways she encapsulates the spirit of the of the 1980s. But she's also contradictory and three-dimensional. She has an imagination and a conscience and there are crossovers between her personality and Paul's.

"The central relationship between these two characters is what fascinated me most. It's so rare in drama to have two characters who matter hugely to each other and affect each other's lives profoundly without making them lovers. But the relationship is so much more complex, challenging and paradoxical as a result.

"I'd never worked with Stephen Poliakoff before, although, like every actor I know, I had always wanted to. He takes you to a completely different place because you get to work in such depth and he just has this way of getting to the reality of a situation. What I love about him is his attention to detail and his precision of thought. He's a complete perfectionist.

"I've been acting since the age of 13 but I'm 30 now and, for me, playing Lizzie felt like a coming-of-age role. When I first met Stephen he said, 'You've played lots of girlish roles where you've had to hide your ego, your ambition, your determination and your intelligence. But here's a character where all that stuff is on the outside.'

"I'm grateful that he saw something in me that other directors hadn't and rode with it. Thanks to him I finally played a grown woman."

TV Choice: Friends And Crocodiles

BBC One, 9 pm

by David Chater, The Times The Knowledge Magazine, January 14, 2006

I watched this film on new year's morning, and there could be no better way to start 2006. Stephen Poliakoff's latest work is a panoramic, stylised view of the excesses of the past 25 years, reflected in the working relationship between two people (Damian Lewis and Jodhi May, above) who -- like brother and sister -- love, threaten and challenge each other. Through the prism of their shifting fortunes, the film encompasses the collective insanity of the property boom and high-tech bubble, when common sense was hurled into the skip alongside thousands of people's savings and livelihoods. Out of this hubris, simple truths emerge -- that people need time to think, they like to be told stories and cannot use the internet to clean their homes. It is a voluptuously filmed and superbly acted miracle of traditional storytelling. See features, pages 6-7 and 38-41.

Top Five In Rep: 2) Friends And Crocodiles / Gideon's Daughter

by James Christopher, The Times The Knowledge Magazine, January 14, 2006

New dramas from Stephen Poliakoff: In the first Damian Lewis is a Gatsby-esque tycoon, while the second stars Bill Nighy and Miranda Richardson and is set in the world of PR (see feature, page 38). National Film Theatre (details as above), Sat (5.45 pm / 8.45 pm)

When Tony Had Chicks Panting

Caitlin Moran channel surfs through the week's TV to find Tony Blair and Damian Lewis stuck in the wrong jobs.

by Caitlin Moran, The Times The Knowledge Magazine, January 14, 2006

Another vexing week looms for Tony Blair, this time thanks to his friends at Channel 4. Firstly, the man in charge of the seventh most powerful economy in the world has to put up with Tony Blair Rock Star, a programme with an intellectual budget of two brain pence. With no more than 11 photographs and a muffled recording of the young Blair's first onstage announcement ("The canteen's about to close, so if you want anything, you'd better get it now") Channel 4 intends to fill a frankly outrageous hour of airtime on the future Prime Minister's "rock years".

This is primarily achieved through the expedient of "reconstructions" of things that "might" have happened -- culminating, most distressingly of all, with the reconstruction of the young Blair getting a blowjob from a groupie. As the faux Blair, the faux groupie and the viewer all realise at the same time, this isn't as much fun as it sounds.

Anyway, it's nice to learn that Blair had a guitar called "Clarence" and his catchphrase was "Let's go, honeys!"

Still presumably reeling from a major broadcaster treating a 30-year-old act of imaginary fellatio as a suitable subject for a programme, Blair then has to put up with The Carole Caplin Treatment, Channel 4's new lifestyle show (Mon-Fri, 3 pm). Obviously Treatment is going to sting the Big T on several levels -- not least because of how thunderously low-rent it is. Personally, as a Briton, I feel shame that our Prime Minister's lifestyle guru is so second-rate she couldn't even get a prime-time slot. Instead, she is shunted into the daytime schedules, of little more import than Under The Hammer.

This is a woman who has allegedly stripped the most powerful man in our country naked, and then daubed him with hot mud. And yet they have put her on at 3 pm. Jeez, you have to ask: what does a girl have to do to get a break in this industry?

Oh, Damian Lewis, Damian Lewis. Living proof that the showbiz world is the lousy, good-for-nothing, mean, sore-riddled, dead-eyed, palsy-hearted sonofabitch we presumed it was all along. Is there anyone more abused by Hollywood than the glorious Lewis? For, despite clearly being born to be James Bond -- all but skiing out of the womb in a tuxedo, drawling, "Well that was nearly a fatal contraction" -- the role went to Daniel Craig instead. Daniel Craig! The man who turned up to the launch of Casino Royale in a speedboat looking as though he was searching for a hat -- possibly bobble -- that had blown overboard.

Anyone who saw Lewis in both The Forsyte Saga and Band Of Brothers can perfectly envisage his Bond -- half privileged 19th-century rapist; half Second World War captain with balls of steel. The best genetic splicing since the Labradoodle. But they won't give Bond to Lewis, and you know why? Because he's ginger. They can't handle the idea of a strawberry blond Bond. They can't envisage the marriage of urbane and auburn.

Of course, once a gigantic wrongness has been committed anywhere in the universe, its ripples cause smaller wrongnesses. The first of what will doubtless be a million wrongness ripples from the non-Lewis Bond debacle surfaces in Sunday's Friends And Crocodiles -- Stephen Poliakoff's dream-like one-off film for BBC One (9 pm, see feature, page 38). Ye Gods, but it looks amazing -- like Alice In Wonderland with big hair. The cinematography will break the hearts of those with a finely tuned sense of the aesthetic.

The only problem with Friends And Crocodiles is, extraordinarily, the glorious Lewis. Because he should have been too busy with Bond to do Friends And Crocodiles, he is, by the ineffable laws of the universe, rubbish. Lewis can do many things, but it turns out that being an eccentric, semi-mystic pedagogue isn't one. Instead, he comes across like Guy Ritchie after a weak doobie. Lewis hasn't got a semi-latent madman in him, unlike, say, Rhys Ifans or Johnny Vegas, either of whom would have aced the role. But then, much Lewis cares. He should be parachuting back to Earth from a recently exploded Albanian satellite station, Shakira between his thighs, drawling "Things sputnik they used to be". Goddamn those sonsofabitch executives.

Hotel Babylon, BBC One's trashy new hotel drama (Thur, 9 pm; Scotland, Fri, 9 pm; not Northern Ireland) fashions itself as a putative Dynasty-meets-Crossroads. It aspires to a knowing vileness -- hotel staff cleaning drinking glasses with dirty towels, shagging on guests' beds and turning a blind eye to wealthy Arabian visitors sacrificing sheep in their suites. While the show itself never really struggles above 6/10, it does mark the second big starring role in as many years in which Max Beesley is brilliant. What's that all about? For ten long years he's only famous as "the maracas-player who shagged Mel B", and then suddenly he's holding 20 per cent of Britain's acting cachet. It must mean something about the changing times. Surely anyone who understood the phenomenon would make a killing on the futures market.

In further news, Desperate Housewives (Wednesday, Channel 4, 10 pm) is back with a second series. Teri Hatcher is still wearing two vests and doing that thing with her eyebrows. This is infinitely more wearying than it was in the first series.