Stephen Poliakoff

Speaker 20:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

Speaker 20:08

The programme was originally broadcast in two thousand and five and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:30

Mike Costaway this week is a playwright and creator of some of the most powerful drama on the small screen. He was brought up in a cultured family in London's Holland Park. His father was a Russian émigré, his mother descended from influential Jewish bankers. He loved theatre from an early age, but he couldn't act, so he wrote. He went to Cambridge, but found it got in the way of his writing, so left in his second year and was soon having his work staged in the commercial theatre. He became writer-in-residence at the National Theatre, and then moved into television. Caught on a train won him a BAFTA. More recently, his series Shooting the Past won the Pre-Italia, and in 2002 he himself was awarded the Dennis Potter Award, again from BAFTA. He's fascinated by history and memory, and where the two meet, never more intensely, than in family relationships. I was very much taught by my father to value originality, he says, that if you had talent, it was your job not to be like other people. He is Stephen Polyakoff.

Presenter1:28

So the onus was on you, Stephen, very much to do something differently, and your work on television certainly is different. Firstly, because usually it's very long and slow not for you the kind of thirty second exchanges and quick cut. You compel the viewer, don't you, to to slow down and take it in.

Stephen Poliakoff1:46

Hopefully, yes. When I went back to writing for television in the late nineties, I thought, right, I'm going to slow it down, make the slowest television the world's ever seen, but hopefully hold an audience at the same time. And Shooting the Past was a result of that. And I was thrilled that it held its audience all the way through. It was a series, yeah.

Presenter2:05

It was a series, yeah. So it was deliberately old-fashioned in inverted commas.

Stephen Poliakoff2:10

Well, I'm not sure old fashioned is quite right because um you know movies are are paced all sorts of different ways and every year they're huge hits that are are quite slow and with long scenes. But at that time it was very, very much into a culture of very quick scenes. The audience couldn't concentrate for a f only for a few minutes. All that you know, history.

Presenter2:30

That's what was said about them. That was not what you believe.

Stephen Poliakoff2:31

That was not said.

Stephen Poliakoff2:33

No, and it's clearly rubbish because I mean children now sit through movies of three hours. Every children's movie, Harry Potter or The Lord Lord of the Rings, is three and a quarter hours. So clearly people can concentrate if they're interested, even at a very young age.

Presenter2:45

So don't underestimate your audience.

Stephen Poliakoff2:46

Never underestimate your audience. I think the great tragedy was that not just in television but all through the media, people underestimated the audience at various stages in the eighties and nineties and are still doing to a certain extent.

Presenter2:59

But your your preoccupation is looking back, isn't it? It's with with history, with archives, unearthing extraordinary facts, moments in history. I mean, we think about a more recent piece, The Lost Prince, Little Prince John, the autistic son of George V, who'd been forgotten and you brought him back. You've used this phrase, seeing history through a half-open door, which is what The Lost Prince did merely because he was there, I suppose, wasn't he? From when was he born? 1905 and died just after the First World War. So he would have had a little skewed view, as it were, of all sorts of things that went on. And similarly that happens in others of your plays, doesn't it?

Stephen Poliakoff3:34

Yes, what I'm trying to do is plonk the audience into the middle of history when I'm writing about history or in when I'm writing about the present, dropping them into the middle of something. But it's often easier to imagine, say you're writing about Tony Blair, to catch a whiff of power through the eyes of a chauffeur or through the eyes of a secretary than it is if you try to enter the head of because most people aren't Prime Minister, but to see how power works just at a slight angle, and the small details often reveal an enormous amount, I think, and also imagine the audience can connect with it.

Presenter4:05

But seeing history through a half-open door is something that very much your your parents and grandparents did, which I want to ask you about. But uh let's have your first record. What is it?

Stephen Poliakoff4:13

My first record is Dusty Springfield. The sound of Dusty Springfield, which is I've listened to all through my life, is a free spirit. Also, it has an extraordinary connection for me with the Wednesday Play. The original credit sequence of Wednesday Play was a woman walking down the street in sort of sixties boots, which sort of have morphed into her brain into an image of Dusty Springfield as well. And those exciting days when you never knew what you were going to see on television, it sums up that for me.

Speaker 34:39

The pounding I feel in my heart

Speaker 34:43

The whole thing that we never far

Speaker 34:47

I can't believe this is really happening to me

Speaker 34:57

I close my eyes and count to ten And when I open them yours dearly I close my eyes

Presenter5:08

Dusty Springfield and I close my eyes and we can't determine we were talking, Stephen Polykoff, about seeing history through a half-open door, which is something an experience that your father very much had. He saw the Russian Revolution.

Stephen Poliakoff5:20

From his nursery window, that's right. My father, who was born in 1910, his family had a a flat literally on Red Square and he witnessed um the events of the October Revolution from his nursery window, in his pajamas as it were. He used to retell this story and all his Russian stories every three months or so. They would be recycled through my childhood and they were incredibly vivid and and told at enormous length. Maybe that's where I get my pacing from it.

Presenter5:40

And told

Presenter5:43

You nearly met Stalin, did you not?

Stephen Poliakoff5:44

I think

Presenter5:46

Great phrase nearly missed.

Stephen Poliakoff5:47

He nearly well, he spent a night in the Kremlin as a boy after the revolution when my grandfather had sort of been adopted after various adventures by the new regime because he was an inventor and helped build the first automated telephone exchange in Moscow. Um they went shooting with what the Commissar of Labour and he said, Oh, come and spend the night in the Kremlin So my father went um and had a midnight meal with with my grandfather and the Commissar of Labour in the Kremlin and

Presenter6:12

So how old would he have been when he was a little bit more?

Stephen Poliakoff6:13

Well, he was then we're talking about yeah, thirteen, fourteen, we're talking about twenty-three, they left in twenty four. A door opened at one o'clock in the morning and uh Flunky um came in and said Stalin is waiting to the Commissar and he watched him disappear to meet Stalin. In fact he was liquidated, um purged the Commissar of Labour soon afterwards and I thought that's such a wonderful image'cause it's very easy to imagine yourself spending a night in in the Kremlin as a boy, you know,'cause you just think how would that feel? Yes, a great big place and and a light on and somebody going across the long passageways. Much easier to imagine that than actually going in and meeting Stalin yourself, watching somebody else go and meet him. And that has influenced the way that I've written a lot.

Presenter6:15

We're talking about

Presenter6:41

Um

Presenter6:52

Yeah, and you wrote a play, uh, Breaking the Silence in the mid-eighties, which was about your grandfather, or wasn't it, your paternal grandfather, a rather grand figure, a white Russian.

Stephen Poliakoff7:01

Yes, he was very unapologetic about the way he dressed. He wore a fur coat, all um grand British clothes, which were trivial anglophile. When upbraided by a revolutionary while he was going around dressed like that, he said, I thought you had a revolution so you could dress like me, not me like you. And he was very he was sort of like I was imagining, I didn't really know him, he died when I was only six, but I imagine he was crossed between Sherlock Holmes and some sort of Russian count, even though he was a Jewish middle-class Jewish person. But he very much adopted grand heirs to stop himself being persecuted.

Presenter7:28

Tompa

Presenter7:33

But he ran from Stalin in the end. He had to.

Stephen Poliakoff7:35

Yes, they escaped in rather dramatic circumstances on a train with one diamond hidden in a shoe and arrived at England penniless except for the one diamond. So I grew up in a sense of things being not completely secure. A little known memory of of what happened was that the people that recently come from the Soviet Union in the twenties were asked to leave. There was a terrific panic about Soviet spies. And my grandfather went along to the Home Office and said, Surely you don't mean me, Joseph Polyakov, is not being asked to leave. And they said, confronted by his grand act, said, No, of course not. So that's why I'm here.

Presenter8:13

Yeah.

Stephen Poliakoff8:14

Well this is Mozart's Clarinet Quintette. It's one of the first um records I bought because um my my parents weren't very interested in classical music. My father listened to Russian music most of the time. And fortunately I bought one of the most beautiful pieces of music I think ever composed, one uh totally by accident. And uh I love this piece of music and uh it's it's sort of haunted my life really.

Presenter9:34

The opening of the Larghetto of Mozart's clarinet quintet played by Gervaise de Pailla with the Amadeus Quartet.

Presenter9:42

So your father, Stephen, was brought here as an adolescent, here to Britain, grew up, married your mother in the thirties. She was very glamorous, wasn't she?

Stephen Poliakoff9:50

She was a beautiful woman, my mother. She wanted to be an actress, but she gave that up when she married.

Presenter9:57

But she your mother was obsessed with your getting into theatre in some form, wasn't she?

Stephen Poliakoff10:01

She did take a huge interest in my my work and

Presenter10:06

Did that feel like a pressure?

Stephen Poliakoff10:07

A little bit. I remember seventeen. When I was seventeen, I'd had one play professionally accepted and then cancelled at the Hampshire Theatre Club. She said, You're seventeen and your career's going nowhere. I remember thinking, That's a bit steep, I'm only seventeen Even though I thought, surely there she shouldn't be saying that to me But I learned to live with it and to shout at it when it's only got took it on, yeah.

Presenter10:24

Oh did you go to the next one?

Presenter10:27

You took your father on, did you?'Cause he he shouted a lot, didn't he?

Stephen Poliakoff10:30

My father was much more difficult to deal with than my mother. My my father had a ferocious Russian temper, which I have inherited a bit of, a corner of, which will amuse some of the

Presenter10:38

What did it do? How did it manifest as a

Stephen Poliakoff10:40

Um well, he was very obsessed with manners, being from old Russia, and if you started eating your peas with your fork the wrong way up, in other words, scooping them up, he suddenly would scream, I'm going to turn the table over, how dare you? and all the glasses would rattle. I can still hear that sound rattling on the table. He would grip the table so that his knuckles shone and he would literally lift the dining room table a few inches off the floor. It never ever completely turned over, but um cutterily would slide. You know, that was a frightening sound.

Presenter11:04

Do you know that

Presenter11:05

But I quoted him as as putting the pressure on you to be original, to take advantage of your talent. Was he original himself?

Stephen Poliakoff11:11

He was. He was a very fascinating, interesting man, and with a very original take, as we were saying out, on the world.

Presenter11:17

He was an inventor too, like his

Stephen Poliakoff11:19

Yes, he was my grandfather was the real inventor and they together invented the pager, which was then called the staff locator for St Thomas's Hospital. The bleeper. The bleeper. And in fact, the only time we were allowed to watch IT V in my youth was to watch it on Emergency Ward 10, the hospital drama, because the doctors actually had their bleeper. Then it was firmly turned back to BBC immediately afterwards.

Presenter11:27

The bleeper.

Presenter11:37

Then it was firm

Presenter11:40

But now all of that that you've just been talking about puts one in mind of of your series for television, Perfect Strangers, because there you've got this very affluent, Jewish, influential, wealthy background coming together in a family reunion and the difficult relationship between the father and the son. That's that's all biographical, autobiographical, isn't it?

Stephen Poliakoff11:55

Um

Stephen Poliakoff11:58

Um well, some of it is autobiographical. Yes, but the elements of the family. The elements of the absolutely were based on my a little bit on my mother's family. My um great aunt Alice had been a friend of Queen Mary's and it was sort of Jewish aristocracy. Um shortly after both my parents had died in the late nineteen nineties, that same family held a big reunion.

Presenter12:01

The elements only were based.

Presenter12:18

And you thought this is good material?

Stephen Poliakoff12:19

Yes, well I was there with my siblings but I had no guy because my parents were dead and I didn't know there were three hundred relations and I ju knew about six of them so it was very weird.

Presenter12:27

And were you shown photographs of the past that suddenly put a new

Stephen Poliakoff12:30

We were we were all given a family tree and you sort of start to make connections and stories began to bubble out even during one day and so so yeah, that was the basis of of that of that drama.

Presenter12:42

Card number three.

Stephen Poliakoff12:44

Well when I was a boy I was obsessed with movie music. It was I used to go journey to a a funny little shop in Bex Hill'cause my parents had a house in near Hastings and I used to journey by myself and there was a very large man behind the counter and we used to talk, me as about 11 year old, him whatever age seemed very old to me but probably was in his twenties about film music and that was my great interest in life was buying film music. I found that incredibly glamorous, not pop music but film music. And I've chosen the Ipcrest file'cause it sums up the extraordinary atmosphere of the sixties, the Cold War, Michael Caine making coffee during the credit sequence and the twanging music sums up that sort of sixties paranoia.

Presenter13:04

Zoom is twenty

Presenter13:54

John Barry's theme music for the film The Ipcress File. So Stephen Polyakoff, rather exotic family background as we've heard, but a very establishment upbringing, prep school, public school, Cambridge and so on. But it wasn't quite as simple as it sounds, was it? Because apparently you had a very traumatic time at prep school. Now was this more than the usual kind of seven or eight year old who's writing tear stained letters home?

Stephen Poliakoff14:17

Well, it certainly con included the Tiers letters, but um it was a very um old fashioned place even for the early sixties what we're talking about. The headmaster had a wooden leg straight out of even war novel where he must have

Presenter14:29

Yeah.

Stephen Poliakoff14:30

Yeah, and um you could hear him creaking I can still hear him uh say this creaking down the passage towards us at night, to beat us with a hairbrush.

Stephen Poliakoff14:37

Uh'cause he was in pain from his war wound he didn't very much like little boys, it seemed, and and used to hit us over the head at regular intervals. And it was a frightening place. I mean a boy ran away and w he was recaptured and paraded in front of us like a prisoner of war. And I hated my time there. I absolutely loath it.

Presenter14:54

Stop snivelling, little Polly was the regular shout.

Stephen Poliakoff14:56

Yes, that was often said to me. It's left me, I think, that experience of prep school with um yeah, a great suspicion of authority. If I'm told, whether it be by BBC executives or indeed we are told by the government, you know, it has to be this way. I I suppose my rebellious streak comes from seeing authority so misused.

Presenter15:15

You went on to Westminster School, which was altogether a happier and more liberal business, and you wrote a play that was put on by the school. What was it about?

Stephen Poliakoff15:23

It was about adolescents being nasty to each other and having sex with each other, which I hadn't experienced then, so it was all um a leap in the dark, as often my work is, and it was r reviewed in the Times. It seems absolutely surreal that that should happen to a schoolboy's play now, but it was again a different age when plays at public schools were regularly reviewed by the Times and The Telegraph.

Presenter15:44

Well reviewed.

Stephen Poliakoff15:45

was very well reviewed in the times and it was

Presenter15:47

Was this Michael Billington?

Stephen Poliakoff15:48

No, no, Sally wasn't Michael Billington, although he did review me as an actor. I was um sabotaged a production of Billy Budd that he reviewed when uh I was playing The Surgeon. I had four lines and reduced the whole audience to hysterics through my bad actions. Well, I think it was I'm afraid he's dead, sir, or some

Presenter16:02

Yeah.

Stephen Poliakoff16:06

I'm not quite certain. I'm not he's not breathing. I'm afraid he's dead. I think it was about that it wasn't that difficult. But anyway, the the the English master directed it. I came off after reducing them to hysterics. And the English master said, You've ruined my production Um I'll never forget him saying that to me with I thought that was a little harsh, I thought since it was near the end.

Stephen Poliakoff16:25

I could only have claimed to ruin the end, but not the whole productions. But nevertheless, it was clear to me I would never be an actor. That was the moment when I realized if I was going to have a life in the theater, it could not be as an actor.

Presenter16:36

Next piece of music.

Stephen Poliakoff16:38

Well, this is Fleetwood Mac. I, as a young writer, used to write to music, often to the same record, going round and round and round, because I shared a flat with four young people, as I was indeed young at that time, and um the only way to blot out the noise was to play music. But if I play different records each half an hour or so, I then started listening to them, so I just played the same record again and again and again, which drove everybody mad except me. I was merrily happy writing away. And one of the records I ruined during the seventies was Fleetwood Mac.

Speaker 317:08

Love you

Speaker 317:10

Isn't the right thing to

Speaker 317:15

How can I ever change things that I feel?

Speaker 317:22

If I could, maybe I'd feel you in my world.

Speaker 317:29

Happy now.

Presenter17:36

The other thing you wanted to be, uh Stephen, and you got a bit further with this one, didn't you, was was a kind of Gerald Durrell or a David Attenborough. You want you and you began life as a bit of a zookeeper at home, didn't you?

Stephen Poliakoff17:49

I did, yes. No, I really, really, really wanted to be um Gerald Darrell or David Atterbra and go off and capture animals in far flung places. And my brother and I set about um capturing some native animals, including a grass snake, a four foot grass snake, in my parents' little cottage in Sussex.

Stephen Poliakoff18:08

And that was, I think, one of the highlights of my entire life was capturing this grass snake and putting it in a plastic bucket. And I sat on the plastic bucket to stop it escaping. Tragedy soon struck, though, because we took it back to London, put it in a large aquarium, and it escaped. But it did then miraculously reappear in our garden in London and lived quite happily for a couple of years, occasionally scaring, much to my delight, my mother's friends coming for tea. They said on a hot August day, and there of a sudden a large snake would emerge and send them scurrying. So we had a zoo, we had pteropins in the basement of London, we had a python, we had a slow worm, we had two doves that were rather boring, and various other things, a few frogs. And the strange smell filtered up through this house, a smell of the zoo.

Presenter18:52

But Gerald Darrell is an interesting influence because he, as we know, wrote My Family and Other Animals and he saw his family as an exotic species. I mean, you you you could say you'd done a bit of the same. Do you regard him as an influence?

Stephen Poliakoff18:54

Yeah.

Stephen Poliakoff18:55

Yeah.

Stephen Poliakoff18:58

Up to

Stephen Poliakoff19:01

Yeah.

Stephen Poliakoff19:02

Well he was a brilliant writer and um and especially at that age his wonderfully vivid books and also a a great pioneer of conservation. I mean if I was told I couldn't write another word I would throw myself lustily into conservation because it's one of my great passions in life. Um I still want to be Gerald Darrell the day without a breath and I'm s working out how on earth I'm going to achieve that at the age of fifty two. But

Presenter19:25

Yeah.

Presenter19:25

But all these stories, you know, Miz at prep school upsetting the masters and mother at home with creepy crawlies and they're all very establishment, very English, and yet, you know, you said on several occasions that you've and you hinted at it earlier on when you're talking about your father, you have this sense of being the outsider, always sort of slightly threatened. I mean, that it must be just inherited, because you never have been, have you?

Stephen Poliakoff19:45

No, I think I certainly have never um been the victim of of overt anti Semitism, for instance. Um more through, I suppose, the way I was brought up in a very eccentric

Stephen Poliakoff19:56

Family, really, and my Russian grandmother was sitting enormous age, she lived to nearly 100 at the top of the house, reliving the Russian Revolution, telling stories about how she met Tolstoy, how she saw the first production of Cherry Orscha. These are great stories. And that Russian side of me, you know, was always there.

Presenter20:15

So you were always made aware of your foreignness in inverted comments, yeah.

Stephen Poliakoff20:18

Check on this, yeah.

Presenter20:19

But but th w there's this story that's often repeated um about you going to see a well known theatre director who uh when you were, what, seventeen or eighteen, who said that you were very young and very arrogant. You know, I mean a true criticism. Bit harsh really. Presumably you were just you know

Presenter20:35

trying to cover up this sense of outsiderness.

Stephen Poliakoff20:38

I suppose I knew that I what I wanted to do, which was to be a playwright, and I think that may have expressed itself in not taking a no for an answer. So, um, yeah, I I wouldn't pretend that that wasn't part of my make up.

Presenter20:53

Code number five.

Stephen Poliakoff20:55

My passion for movie music, um I want to reflect that again in the fact that one of my great pleasures for me directing my own work has been working with composers and I work with lots of good composers and I've had an extremely close relationship with a brilliant composer called Adrian Johnson and I've chosen um this music from the end of the Lost Prince because it's beautiful music but also it it reflects a very important side of my work and what I really enjoy doing at the current time.

Presenter21:51

Never was a child like him from Adrian Johnson's music for the series The Lost Prince, which was written and directed by my castaway, Stephen Polyakoff. So you were sent age seventeen following the success with the school play, which was called Granny, wasn't it? That school play, to see Peggy Ramsey, the doyen of theatre, the the agent. She represented all the best playwrights, didn't she? All male.

Stephen Poliakoff22:12

Yes, she didn't like women playwrights. Um or she did r represent Carol Churchill, but that was a very big exception. She loved young male talent. She really, really

Presenter22:21

And Old Melt. I mean Robert Bow, Alan.

Stephen Poliakoff22:23

Yeah, no, no, no. She had wonderful roster of of playwrights both Alan A. Bourne, um David Hare, um, um, David Mercer, John Mortimers, um and everybody really. And what was brilliant about her was that she would um

Presenter22:26

Go Cameron Aboard.

Presenter22:29

John Mortimer? Uh

Stephen Poliakoff22:36

return your phone call as an eighteen, nineteen year old as quickly as she would ring back Robert Bolt because and I you know, she never lost that. She really um loved young

Presenter22:44

But tell me about that first meeting, because you must have been

Stephen Poliakoff22:48

Yeah, I went I'm not arrogant as you

Presenter22:48

Arrogant as you might have been, you must have come with some trepidation.

Stephen Poliakoff22:49

You must have gone with some trip, you didn't. My mum was very excited that I was going to sit. And I imagine this rather grand, like sort of Coral Brown or sorry, playing this grand in West Ender dress. And there was this woman who looked rather like young Thora Heard, beautifully dressed, but not a beauty, and not elegant, and very, very, she wasn't wearing any shoes, and she was very stocking feet, very, very loud. And she kept on flinging her legs up on the desk. And she said, That sofa you're sitting on, dear, is the one that I made love to UNESCO on. Although that is not how she described it, there were many four-letter words sprinkled in. And I kept on thinking, how am I going to tell my mother this? I'm not going to be able to give a full account of this at all. She'll never believe it. Anyway, she was a ferocious critic, and she also changed her mind. Many times she said that plays crap, and then when it's success, she said, I always loved it, you know, so you know.

Presenter23:27

This

Presenter23:42

It was two, wasn't it, of your the first play of yours that went on in London, Pretty Boy.

Stephen Poliakoff23:45

Yeah, no, she said nobody would ever do this play, and then the Royal Court accepted it. There was a phone call while I was at King's summoning me to the Porter's Lodge, where you receive phone calls before mobiles and those. And it was from Bill Gaskell around the Royal Court. And as I approached the Porter's Lodge, I thought, this is, he wouldn't be ringing unless this was good news. And I just had a sense of my life changing as I approached the Porter's Lodge, and it was sort of true because with encouraged by that, I left Cambridge early to write. But.

Presenter24:04

Praise

Presenter24:11

So that this was the big moment. This is he said, I'm going to put it on.

Stephen Poliakoff24:13

Yeah.

Presenter24:14

But it wasn't a full-scale

Stephen Poliakoff24:15

No, it was a Sunday night. They used to do try out performances.

Presenter24:18

And how was it received, Pretty Boy?

Presenter24:21

It was

Stephen Poliakoff24:22

Mixed. It was thought of as arresting, I think.

Presenter24:26

Well, arresting enough for you to decide to end there and then your your well, a bit later on, but not long after your your your university career, as you say. But you there was more reason than that. You said that

Stephen Poliakoff24:26

Uh

Stephen Poliakoff24:27

Arresting enough for you to decide

Stephen Poliakoff24:29

And then you're you well, it would

Presenter24:37

You know, Cambridge for you was a kind of finishing school and just, you know, not worth it. Well, it's a bit harsh and

Stephen Poliakoff24:44

Well, the history course, I'm sure it's great now, but when I was there in nineteen seventy two, um it was appalling, but I thought, Oh, well tell with this, I'll just leave.

Presenter24:53

You've never regretted that.

Stephen Poliakoff24:53

You've never really

Stephen Poliakoff24:54

No. And it earned me a lot of street cred on in the fringe. But also it was a very people think it was still a radical studenty time then, but in fact it had already that brief moment when students thought they would change the world had had blown away very quickly. And a very discernible world which would be recognised now, which is the people buckling down to get jobs, was already happening.

Presenter25:16

Number six.

Stephen Poliakoff25:17

From that moment in Cambridge I spent a lot of my life in the theatre writing plays. Obviously I spent a lot of time in television as well but over the last 30 years about 80-70% of the time has been in the theatre and I wanted to express that and choice. So I've chosen a piece of Purcell's The Fairy Queen which was written for production by Son I Street and it's a world that I really enjoyed being part of and soon to return to.

Speaker 325:53

Uh

Presenter26:38

Oh, let me weep, forever weep, from Purcell's The Fairy Queen, sung by Jennifer Vivian with the English Chamber Orchestra conducted by Benjamin Britton. You became prolific after that, Stephen. You wrote five or six plays, I think, in the second half of the seventies and really began to get noticed, uh including the first national theatre production at the Cottesloe Strawberry Fields. You wrote, in many ways, didn't you, about a world that you didn't really know, things removed from your immediate experience, the kind of concrete jungle precincts, walkways, wimpy bars.

Presenter27:07

Something just outside the frame of your life.

Stephen Poliakoff27:10

Yes, I wrote a lot about um urban life and about young people um expressing their dissatisfaction growing up in city centres. And clearly I wasn't a working class kid hanging out on the streets. But

Speaker 227:23

So why did you do that then?

Stephen Poliakoff27:24

Well, because we all share the same culture. I wrote about disc jockeys, I I wrote about eating at Wimpy Bars, about what was then called shopping precincts, now shopping malls that were t you know, all sprouting up all over um Britain. I was writing about a landscape of the mind really as as well as not real, literal social realism. And I I do feel that as a writer that you should be able to

Presenter27:40

It's

Stephen Poliakoff27:49

imagine yourself into most situations, especially as a playwright. I mean, setting a whole novel in in Amelia which you don't know really well is more difficult than writing a play, which after all is a very stylized thing anyway. I mean even very naturalistic plays are very stylized'cause to get to lasso a whole human experience in two hour two and a half hours. So um and also because I write in a slightly heightened way anyway, I don't write dead on realism as it were. Seven.

Stephen Poliakoff28:21

Well, relating to the dark days of the eighties, I've chosen Joan Alma-Trading because I often listened to her during the eighties at that confusing time, a very, very divided country, a very bleak time in many ways, where it seemed caring about the less fortunate in society was very unfashionable, and the time of the miners' strike and all that. I often turned to Joan Alma-Chading because of this extraordinary limpid simplicity of the way she sings her songs, the directness and the wisdom, I think, and I still find this song incredibly potent.

Speaker 328:56

With friends are still feeling so insecure

Speaker 329:01

Little darl, I believe you could help me a lot.

Speaker 329:06

Just take my hand and leave it where you will.

Speaker 329:11

No conversation, don't wake good night

Speaker 329:16

Just make love with a venture.

Presenter29:21

Joan Alma Trading and Love and Affection. You're an unapologetic supporter of television as a medium, Stephen, but there's a snobbishness about it, isn't there? That somehow there's a view in many artistic circles that it can't hold its own against the theatre, against the stage, against the novel even. Not what you believe.

Stephen Poliakoff29:38

Um, no, I certainly don't believe that. And I think that uh probably that view, although it's still pre prevalent, is not as prevalent as it used to be. James Potter, the Sing Detective, for instance, probably had more influence um and uh is remembered far more than any British film made in the last twenty years. So um there are these great works of television.

Presenter29:58

But you've gone further you've said it's more exciting than the theatre.

Stephen Poliakoff30:01

Yes, I mean I think that I I love the theater, but I mean one of the frustrating things about the theatre is that you don't reach many people. Um the extraordinary thing about television drama, even now with so many channels, is that you do reach an enormous amount of people and if they like something, they do remember it. That's the extraordinary thing.

Presenter30:18

So if it's big audiences you like, why haven't you been tempted? You must have been offered, you know, offers from Hollywood, the cinema, big film.

Stephen Poliakoff30:20

Yeah.

Stephen Poliakoff30:26

Yeah, well I mean big audiences but artistic control is is the thing. And of course I like making my own work, you know, and I'm I'm great admirers of people um like Ken Loach and Mike Lee and things who just do their own work and just consistently do it. And eventually you reach you know, it's taken both those guys a while to reach a world audience, but eventually you you sort of hit a a sort of critical mass and the work go goes global.

Presenter30:51

But Mike Lee still turns down Hollywood for the same reason.

Stephen Poliakoff30:53

Yeah, yeah. Big bucks certainly you don't get with this country. But I mean, I'm lucky enough to have artistic control and that's a fantastic you know, I I've just made two r very large scale single

Presenter30:55

Big banks mean you have to do as you go.

Stephen Poliakoff31:08

Dramas in terms of them being long. Anyway, and for television. For television, yeah. And what maybe?

Speaker 231:11

For television.

Speaker 231:13

Yeah.

Stephen Poliakoff31:14

for the B B C. And we'll see how that goes. But it's a very ambitious in the sense of the scale of them to try to see um

Presenter31:20

And what is it? What what history? Whose half open door?

Stephen Poliakoff31:23

Well, there's our recent history. Uh one of them's a big sweeping story about a uh putting it crudely about a boss and a secretary and how the world went in the eighties and nineties, but not a saga so much as this quite individual relationship um and meeting them at various spaces of time through those twenty years. The second film which stars Bill Nye and Miranda Richardson is about um fathers and daughters and about our fears for our children as the world changes. And I may or may not make a third film which gets to the present. So basically I set myself a task of trying to write about how we've ended up where we are, but not in a sort of polemical way, but in very visceral personal stories.

Presenter32:03

Last record

Stephen Poliakoff32:05

Well, I've always loved Vivaldi's music. I've spent a lot of happy times in Venice, both at the film festival and on holidays with my family. And I l I love the sexiness and boldness of Vivaldi's music. And I also think that one probably on this island needs a bit of sacred music for the good of the soul, so I've combined the two with Vivaldi's Gloria.

Speaker 333:11

God is God.

Presenter33:24

The opening of Vivaldi's Gloria in D major, performed by the sixteen choir and orchestra conducted by Harry Christophers. Now, if you could only take one of those eight records, Stephen, which one would you take?

Stephen Poliakoff33:34

I take the Mozart Tarnette Quintet.

Presenter33:37

And your book?

Stephen Poliakoff33:37

Since I'm on this island and there'll be lots of delightful animals on it and fish of course, my chance to become Gerald Darrell is complete. So um My Friendly and Other Animals is I think one of the most delightful books in the English language and the book that's probably influenced me most of my life in a funny way. So I would definitely have that. And your luxury.

Stephen Poliakoff33:56

Well, it probably is a necessity rather than luxury, but because as anybody knows who's worked with me that I fiddle all the time, it's sort of genetic thing that all my siblings fiddle, I would have to fiddle with. I fiddle with plastic straw. I used to fiddle with anything, barrows, um, paper and uh I used to leak

Presenter34:05

Do you fiddle?

Stephen Poliakoff34:13

ink like blood coming out of my mouth chewing on a barrel. And an actor changed my life, said, Why don't you try plastic straws? And I've fiddled with plastic straws ever since. So I would have to take one of those sort of boxes that you have at parties or plastic straws on the island and then I would never run out,'cause they last a long time.

Presenter34:29

Stephen Polyakov, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island discs.

Stephen Poliakoff34:33

Thank you very much.

Speaker 234:42

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk/slash radio four.