History has always been a central subject in Stephen Poliakoff's television drama, but what's distinctive about his notion of the past is what one might call his white Russian aesthetic: the sense of history as catastrophe. In Shooting the Past (1999), Oswald Bates is looking at some photos. "I have to say just one thing to make these pictures absolutely electrifying. These people… are about to be hit by the most terrible change. Their whole world's turned upside down. They have no idea. Uncertainty beyond their wildest dreams." Shooting the Past is about a group of people in an old institution whose lives are turned upside down by sudden change, and about how they react. The Lost Prince (2004) is about a young boy living in the Ruritanian world of the British royal family. However, what gives it the distinctive Poliakoff twist, he writes in the introduction to the published screenplay, is "that his [the prince, Johnnie's] short life spanned one of the most momentous periods of our history." In a few years empires fall, heads of state are executed.
In Friends and Crocodiles (2006) the central character, Paul, explains why he is so interested in crocodiles: "Big, big asteroid hits the Earth—there's a huge reptile that survives totally unchanged, survives the huge bang, just the same now as two hundred million years ago! How did he manage it?"
This is the question that also hangs over Poliakoff's other new television drama, Gideon's Daughter. Britain has been hit by its own big bang—Thatcherism and what we can now see as its sequel, New Labour (Blair's Al Pacino to Thatcher's Brando). Everything has been thrown in the air. Opportunists have a field day. Few can resist the seductions of the new market world. How do some survive, their values intact? Paul in Friends and Crocodiles and Gideon, the central character in Gideon's Daughter, are both, in different ways, crocodiles. Both find a way of surviving late 20th-century Britain as decent, maverick human beings.
There is a second, distinctively Poliakoff spin on all this. In order to survive this kind of huge change, you have to be eccentric, on the border of a kind of madness. Poliakoff is drawn to these kinds of characters—Oswald in Shooting the Past, Paul and Gideon, and Ray in Perfect Strangers (2001). There is something crazy about all of them. They are the kind of people you might avoid on a bus or at a party; all come close to some kind of collapse. They are trouble. And yet, Poliakoff wants to say, there is something decent and human about the values they embody. If the plays are sentimental (and they are, in both good and bad ways), it has something to do with Poliakoff's desire for goodness to triumph in a bad world. What he does is to take these mavericks and to build a kind of family around them so that by the end, when all is resolved, a new kind of community has been built out of the wreckage of individualism. It is no coincidence that the final, powerful scene of Friends and Crocodiles echoes the opening titles of Paul Abbott's Shameless, another (far more) sentimental account of how community and family triumph against the odds.
Why is Poliakoff's recent work, going back at least to Shooting the Past, so much more interesting than that of any other television dramatist over the past 20 years? Because there is so much going on in his work. He is also a great storyteller, fascinated by narrative. Both Shooting the Past and Gideon's Daughter begin with a strange narrator who starts to tell us a story. Poliakoff's best work will often stop and tell a story. Marilyn in Shooting the Past is like Scheherazade: putting off a terrible fate by telling stories. Stephen in Perfect Strangers, Oswald, and William Sneath in the new films have other reasons for telling their stories: they are haunted by the past (Stephen) or fascinated by a character (William).
Poliakoff is also fascinated by images; the haunting photographs in Shooting the Past and Perfect Strangers, obviously, but also the butter-race at the beginning of The Lost Prince, the giant inflatable butterfly and the crocodile in Friends and Crocodiles and the final shot of the illuminated church in Gideon's Daughter. With this goes an interest in perfect stillness: people who sit motionless as if frozen in time—the young Lizzie waiting to see Paul; Gideon gazing at his daughter singing.
Time in Poliakoff sometimes moves incredibly quickly. Marilyn has no time to save her photographic collection. Gideon has no time to save his relationship with his daughter. Things smash (the old lamps in Friends and Crocodiles) or go off the road (the red bus) and without warning, a child is killed. And then there is "dreamtime" (a word that recurs in Poliakoff's writing), when time slows down in a story or is frozen in an image or a gaze.
Poliakoff's new plays confirm his place as one of the great British writers (and directors) of the past half-century. He is doing something that no one else is doing in television today: creating a body of work that allows distinctive ideas and preoccupations to overlap and grow, that tell us about what has happened to Britain and what storytelling can be in a medium taken over by carpetbaggers.
