The Independent du lieu suivant : London, Greater London, England • 84

2 COVER SIDE? THE INDEPENDENT FRIIW 6 JANTJARy2006 CULTURAL LIFE STELLA VINE ARTIST 1 Stephen Poliakoff has inherited Dennis Potters crown as TVs foremost writer, GERARD GILBERT talks to Mm about Ms new stated The feast of Stephen Visual arts I saw Chantal Joffe's exhibition at Viqtoria Miro Gallery the other day, I really liked that, and her brother Jasper Joffe's show at Sartorial In Notting Hill Gate was excellent too. In fact, I bought a painting. Books At the moment I am reading The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion, It's such a great book about death. In the pile next to my bed, ready for a New Year break on the Isle of Arran, is The Sea by Iris Murdoch. It's about time I gave that a go, I thought Virginia Woolf and Vanessa BeU: A Very Close Conspiracy by Jane Dunn is only right and proper for me to read as a Bloomsbuiy resident, then an artist friend has given me JK Huysmans Against Nature, and The Outsider by Albert Camus.

So they will all be squashed into my new Top shop silver leather bag along with a couple of old favourites, After The End of Art by Arthur Danto and Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Nietzsche, and just in case if feel the urge, some water-colour equipment Music I'm flitting between Lest We Forget, the best of Marilyn Man son, for when I feel a bit cocky, and Cute, (H)ey? by Ivor Cutler for more reflective deep thoughts, with the occasional bit of Jimi Hendrix's Are You Experienced? thrown in for moments of wild abandon. I like Pete Doherty's new album too, Down in Albion. His genius performance with Elton John at Live 8 was one of my life's favourite moments. Him I wanted to catch Bugsy Malone at the Curzon last week. I watched that nlm three times as a wee lass when it came out in Gateshead.

Blousy Brown was an early inspiration to me, although I find carrying a baseball bat at all times is now illegal. I missed it of course, as Liberty's cafe, beckoned to me with cake. However, I am afraid it's been the box set of Bette Davis DVDs that has kept me sweet for the past week, although I am beginning to see why she may be responsible for my lack of a boyfriend. I watched all the Pedro Almodovar box set straight through. Interview by Charlotte Cripps Stella Vine's limited-edition prints are available to buy at www.steUavine.com Strangers has led to Poliakoff being seen as our pre-eminent TV dramatist, in much the same way as Dennis Potter was (suitably, Poliakoff won Bafta's prestigious Dennis Potter Award in 2002).

The unfashionably languorous pace of the films, and their interest in unusual subjects such as memory and family history, struck a chord with viewers starved of such unashamedly highbrow, meditative drama. And, although Poliakoff doesn't like the suggestion that he's "a beast that is allowed to do what he wants while no one else is," there is no doubting the special treatment he's given by the BBC Why the corporation is even shifting iVieuw at Ten to accommodate him. "It was all part of the deal, becausel wouldn't have written them otherwise. The director general himself had to give permission, not just a mere controller," he says with a delighted cackle. His new films Ca third is constitute nothing less than a state-of-the-nation trilogy, or "something that illustrates how we ended up where we are how," as Poliakoff prefers to put it He is clearly disenchanted with where Britain finds itself in 2006.

"I've been thinking for a longtime how to write about the recent past because so much has changed in the past 20 years and there hasn't been much at all about that on television." In Friends and Crocodiles, which stretches from the inner-city riots of 1981 to the dotcom bubble of the late 1990s, Damian Lewis plays Paul, a properly developer made good, a dreamer and inventor now living in a country pile surrounded by painters, politicians, poets and assorted freeloaders: "A bit like a rock star, but hopefully more interesting," Poliakoff says. Paul hires a sensible local estate agent (played by Jodhi May) to bring order to his visionary ideas personal computers and wind turbines, for example and to help bring them to fruition. As Lewis's Gatsbyesque character throws one too many parties, May's secretary flourishes under the Thatcherite work ethic "I've always wanted to write about work, because we think about work most of the time and yet there is virtually nothing written about it Poliakoff says. "Also, work relationships can be more intense than marriages, and I'm always intrigued when I hear someone say of somebody else that 'she used to be my secretary and now she's really powerful'. David Cameron is a brilliant example.

He A fortnight before I interview Stephen Poliakoff; I am sitting across the aisle from him at a screening of his. new BBC film, Friends and Crocodiles, and can't but help notice his spasmodic body movements as his film unfolds. It is as if he is reUving each and every creative impulse that went into writing and directing the work. Now at his den in the London offices of the production company Talkback Thames -the vall is a collage of stills from more recent works (The Lost Prince, Shooting thePast tPetffiStttmgers) and two new ones, Friends and Crocodiles and Gideon's Daughter he's just as wired, He's reclining on a sofa, but only after nearly two hours does he relax enough for his foot to stop jiggling. There's no sign of the famous drinking-straw he carries to fiddle with, but if probably as well that he doesn't smoke.

I have discovert that I like Poliakoff far more than Fd expected to. Grotesquely caricatured in a newspaper cutting as a "wild-eyed Rasputin (he is undoubtedly intense, small and with unruly black hair and beard), he admits to inheriting his Russian father's explosive temper; Fve heard that he doesn't suffer fools gladly. There is only one brief fusillade of exasr peration, when I ask him about the crocodile motif in his new film "What do you mean, you didn't understand the crocodile?" he says, more incredulous than tetchy, like a teacher realising that he has a particularly dense pupil on his hands. "It's quite simple. Why didnt the dinosaurs survive the mass extinction, and crocodiles did? If one of the most interesting questions of all." It may well be, but these are patently more cerebral concerns than those of your average TV dramatist -and they are what give Poliakoff his unique standing in the medium Sometimes, however; the drama and the ideas are uneasy bedfellows.

One TV critic likened watching a Poliakoff film to listening to an intelligent drunk at a party, mixing brilliant insights with cliches so crass "that you want to pour the contents of the ice bucket over his But dissenters form a distinct minority, last yearj his film about George Vs autistic son Prince John, TheLostPrince (shown again on BBC2 at new year), won three Emmysf television's equivalent of the Oscars. And the critical rapture that greeted Shooting the Past and Perfect was quite a lowly person at Carlton Television not long ago, and now he could be prime minister." Apart from Lewis and May; the cast includes Robert Lindsay as a hack journalist who links Friends and Crocodiles with the second film, Gideon's Daughter, This stars Bill Nighy as a disenchanted PR guru and Miranda Richardson as a grieving mother with whom he falls in love, Poliakoff attributes his ability to attract quality casts to the quality of his scripts, rather than any freedoms granted to the actors. Mike Leigh-style improvisations are not for him. "No, I very much of the Hitchcock school; he said something like, 'If too late for a conductor of a symphony orchestra to change the music' I take a long time to write things, and then it's sort of finished. And because the work is quite complex, I'd be lost if I started changing Poliakoff was born in Holland Park, west London in 1952, where he grew up with two sisters and a brother and a Russian grandmother living in the attic, who instilled in him a continuing fascination with the darker and more complex shades of European history.

Poliakoff 's paternal grandfather whose life was the basis of his 1984 play Breaking the Si-lence was a White Russian who survived the mass expulsion of Jews from Russia and the upheavals of the 1917 Revolution thanks to his technological prowess. "My grandfather helped to build the first au-tomated telephone exchange in Moscow," Poliakoff says. His grandfather fled Russia in 1924, when Stalin came to power, with nothing but a bag of golf clubs and a diamond concealed in his shoe (the golf clubs were to distract the guards from the diamond). He started an electronics company with Poliakoff's father Alexander; he of the volcanic temper, "We had a lot of fights," Poliakoff says, "but I realised he was an extraordinary figure The company designed a hearing aid used by Winston Churchill and invented the hospital pager. Poliakoff recalls that the only time the family was allowed to watch "downmarket" ITV was to witness pagers being used in Emergency Ward 10, although the invention didn't make the family terribly rich.

"He wasnt a brilliant businessman," says Poliakoff, who claims he has inherited this lack of entrepreneurial acumen. "From time to time, people suggest I start an independent production company, but I'm horrified by the idea My father's INSIDE Cover story 2-4 Thomas Sutcliffe 5 First Impression 5 Him 6-B Rock, Pop World 14-19 Books 20-27 Charts 29 Visual arts 30 THE WEEK AHEAD Monday: VisualArts Tuesday: ClmsiailMusk Wednesday: Architecture Radio Thursday: Theatre Friday: Film, Rock Books.