Stephen Poliakoff

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 13 March 2005

⏱️ 37 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the playwright and director Stephen Poliakoff. Stephen Poliakoff is probably best known for his explorations of the themes of memory, family and history in his dramas for television, including Shooting the Past, Perfect Strangers and The Lost Prince.

He was born into an aristocratic, Russian Jewish family in 1952, the third of four children. Stephen's talent as a dramatist emerged from the embers of his ambition to be an actor. He discovered early that he could write, and his first play, Granny, was sufficiently well received to be made the school play - and to be reviewed by a major national paper. Later, during the 1970s, Stephen began to work in television with films like Stronger than the Sun for Play for Today and Caught on a Train - which won a BAFTA. His television film Close My Eyes won the Evening Standard Best Film Award in 1991; the series Shooting the Past won the Prix Italia in 1999 and in 2002 he won the Dennis Potter Award at the BAFTAs.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: Quintet For Clarinet and String Quartet in A Major (Larghetto) by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Book: My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell Luxury: A box of plastic straws to fiddle with

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.
0:05.0	For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
0:08.0	The program was originally broadcast in 2005, and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My castaway this week is a playwright and creator of some of the most powerful drama on the small screen.
0:35.3	He was brought up in a cultured family in London's Holland Park. His father was a Russian
0:40.0	emigray. His mother descended from influential Jewish bankers. He loved
0:44.1	theatre from an early age but he couldn't act, so he wrote. He went to Cambridge but
0:48.4	found it got in the way of his writing, so left in his second year and was soon
0:52.2	having his work staged in the
0:53.9	commercial theatre. He became writer in residence at the National Theatre and then
0:57.9	moved into television, caught on a train one Emma Bafter. More recently his series Shooting the Past won the pre-Italian and in 2002 he
1:06.3	himself was awarded the Dennis Potter Award again from Baffa. He's fascinated by history and memory and where the two meet, never more intensely than in family
1:16.4	relationships.
1:17.4	I was very much taught by my father to value originality, he says, that if you had talent talent it was your job not to be like
1:25.2	other people he is Stephen Polyakov so the onus was on you Stephen very much to do
1:31.0	something differently and your work on television certainly is
1:34.1	different firstly because usually it's very long and slow not for you the kind of
1:40.1	30 second exchanges and quick cut m You compel the viewer, don't you, to slow down and take
1:46.0	it in?
1:47.0	Hopefully, yes. When I went back to writing for television in the late 90s, I thought, right, I'll go and to slow it down, make the slowest television
1:55.6	the world has ever seen, but hopefully hold an audience at the same time and shooting
2:00.4	the past was the result of that. and I was thrilled that it held its
2:04.2	audience all the way through. Because it was serious, yes. So it was deliberately
	...

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