Arts: The race against time

Radically old-fashioned - that's how Stephen Poliakoff describes his latest TV drama. What can he mean?

First of all, clearly, I don't have a video camera. And for the first time in my life it would have helped having one. Bit bloody late to buy one, this being the last afternoon of my life." Timothy Spall's pudgy face looms into the lens. He's recording the extraordinary events of his final days and, 13 seconds into the BBC's new drama Shooting the Past, you're hooked.

As Spall nibbles on a slice of toast and girds his storytelling loins, he whets our appetite still further, explaining that his story is of vital importance because it can happen to anyone: "Anyone who has suddenly lost their job or house or even business, or just had someone promoted above them. Anyone who knows how that feels, this is for you."

This vivid opening sequence is not only arresting, it's a startlingly clear statement of intent by the writer and director Stephen Poliakoff. He not only tightens the narrative screw with the threat of Spall's impending death, he alerts you to the drama's themes: the quirkiness of individuals, the collision between past and future, the responsibilities of individuals and, above all, the recording of history. Shooting the Past is a race against time, set in an anachronistic library housing a priceless collection of millions of historic photographs, overseen by a skeleton staff headed by the coolly authoritative Lindsay Duncan and the eccentric, cardigan- wearing Spall. When an American businessman (Liam Cunningham) arrives, announcing that he has bought them up and that the collection must be sold, opposing worlds collide.

"I would love it if people said it was old-fashioned," beams Poliakoff, enveloped in a comfy, wing-backed chair in his Islington, London home. His brief was to write something that people wouldn't easily forget - "Quite difficult," he says, grinning over his understatement - but it led him back to his lifelong fascination with the power of photographs.

Although the piece is, in his own words, "dialogue-heavy - there's no reason why TV can't do dialogue", pictures are at its heart. There are two pivotal sequences vaguely reminiscent of the classic scene in Antonioni's Sixties film Blow-Up, where we watch David Hemmings discover a murder in a series of pictures he has taken by accident. Here, we and the characters gaze at a succession of photographs brought together by Duncan to show to Cunningham. The first tells the true story of a Jewish girl in pre- War Germany but, although her tale is extremely moving, Poliakoff isn't just out to evoke pathos. It's a crunch moment in the plot and, even as we respond to the pictures, we're aware that Duncan is manipulating the story for her own ends. It's a gratifyingly complex scene.

Writers are usually reticent or downright evasive about their objectives but Poliakoff is unusually forthcoming. His early stage work has been described as cinematic. In 1989, however, he wrote: "Cinema is generally the wrong medium to try to reveal complex character changes or to attempt to operate dramatically on two or three levels at once. Both are clearly central aspirations in most of my plays." Ten years later, that statement is supported by these two telling sequences. Ultimately, Shooting the Past is an exploration of character and circumstance in a medium poised between film and theatre. "I was determined to write something with long, sustained scenes, the sort of thing one can only do on television... you can in theatre but in a different way. I wanted to do something that wasn't trying to be cinema yet would use the power of great acting in close-up. I've deliberately tried to slow television down, but to make it compelling."

To that extent, it genuinely is old-fashioned. "Radically, I hope," asserts Poliakoff. That's a hardly surprising word for someone whose work has been political with small "p" since his first play back in 1971 when he was just 19. He's always regarded his writing as political but not as in agitprop or even as part of the Seventies wave of writers who believed Britain was teetering on the brink of revolutionary change.

"I've tried not to write within conventions or genres and to be provocative about showing the nature of whatever world in a different way," he says. "That, I think, is a political act."

His early plays, like Hitting Town or City Sugar, dwelt in an urban world of neon and concrete populated by disaffected youth. He gradually moved further afield, winning a huge audience for Caught on a Train, a gripping, one-off BBC drama about a man who travels to Vienna accidentally, accompanied by an elderly, terrifyingly austere Viennese woman memorably played by Peggy Ashcroft. Then, in 1984, he wrote Breaking the Silence, based on his grandfather, an inventor who dressed as if for the opera and travelled on his own train. All this in Leninist Russia.

His most famous work, however, is his 1991 film, which has been something of a calling card ever since. Close My Eyes was about an incestuous relationship between brother and sister Clive Owen and Saskia Reeves during the last gasp of Eighties greed. It was set in Docklands and the bewitchingly beautiful Home Counties. That sense of place, the physical and political context, is his hallmark. If Pinter hadn't already used the title, he could have called any number of his works Landscape.

Place and safety within any given society are obviously key Jewish concerns, so does the literal and metaphorical importance of location stem from Poliakoff being Jewish?

"That's never been put to me," he says, surprised. "I think it may be." Yet his London upbringing was only Jew-ish. He'd been sent to an extremely Anglican Surrey prep school where he was the only Jew. "On Sundays we all had to turn to face the altar and say the Creed and everyone would look at me because I didn't know what to say. It was a powerful reminder of being separate. I always felt slightly apart." Discomfiting, but no bad thing for a writer, and it had a powerful effect. "I was there for five years and was pretty unhappy. It gave me a terror of authority."

That, too, continually resurfaces in his writing, the tension between being connected to and separate from institutions, structures and authorities. "Yes," he muses, "I write about fear quite a lot." All this comes together in Talk of the City, his fascinating recent RSC hit, about to transfer to the Young Vic. In the far-off land of 1937 BBC Light Entertainment, a happy-go-lucky crooner and comedy man becomes involved in dangerously subversive ideas about what was happening to Jews in Europe.

Period plays are, of course, as much about the time they are written in as the era in which they're set. "As we're about to burst into a realm of thousands of channels, now seemed the right time to do it." In 1937 the BBC had only one channel, which was even broadcast across America - "Imagine Casualty being beamed across the whole of the United States!" he giggles, gleefully - but it was experiencing a similar reign of management terror and control as the current corporation.

"I'm very interested in the power some people have over others. We're living in a very controlling world and all sorts of people no longer know what's going on. In Shooting the Past, someone comes in from the outside world, bashes through the door and says, `You've got to come under this discipline'. That has to be resisted." He concedes that it's difficult to see where that resistance is going to come from. "But then, nothing ever runs in straight lines," he remarks, confidently. "Something is going to happen."

`Shooting the Past' starts on Sunday on BBC 2; `Talk of the City' is at the Young Vic from 3 Feb (0171-928 6363); the scripts are published by Methuen