In 1909, John was
discovered to have epilepsy. As his condition deteriorated, he was
sent to live at Sandringham House and was kept away from the public
eye. There, he was cared for by his governess, "Lala" Bill,
and befriended local children whom his mother had gathered to be his
playmates. Prince John died at Sandringham in 1919, following a
severe seizure, and was buried at nearby St Mary Magdalene Church.
His illness was disclosed to the wider public only after his death.
Prince John's
alleged seclusion has subsequently been brought forward as evidence
for the inhumanity of the royal family. However, records show that
the Prince was in some ways given favourable treatment by his
parents, in comparison to his siblings, and contrary to the belief
that he was hidden from the public from an early age, John for most
of his life was a "fully-fledged member of the family",
appearing frequently in public until after his eleventh birthday.
His long
acknowledged learning disability and a possible intellectual
disability have both been linked to his severe epilepsy; recent
speculation finds some behaviors consistent with autism.
Birth
Prince John was born
at York Cottage on the Sandringham Estate on 12 July 1905, at 3:05
a.m.[3] He was the youngest child and fifth son of George Frederick,
Prince of Wales and Mary, Princess of Wales (née Mary of Teck). He
was named John despite that name's unlucky associations for the royal
family,[4] but was informally known as "Johnny". At the
time of his birth, he was sixth in the line of succession to the
throne, behind his father and four older brothers. As a grandchild of
the reigning British monarch in the male line, and a son of the
Prince of Wales, he was formally styled His Royal Highness Prince
John of Wales from birth.
John was christened
on 3 August in the Church of St Mary Magdalene at Sandringham, the
Reverend Canon John Neale Dalton officiating. His godparents were
King Carlos I of Portugal (his third cousin once removed, for whom
the Prince of Wales stood proxy), the Duke of Sparta (his first
cousin once removed), Prince Carl of Denmark (his uncle by marriage
and first cousin once removed, for whom the Prince of Wales stood
proxy), Prince John of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg (his
great-great-uncle, for whom the Prince of Wales stood proxy),
Alexander Duff, 1st Duke of Fife (his uncle by marriage, for whom the
Prince of Wales stood proxy), the Duchess of Sparta (his first cousin
once removed, for whom Princess Victoria of the United Kingdom stood
proxy), and Princess Alexander of Teck (his first cousin once
removed, for whom Princess Victoria stood proxy).
Early life and
illness
Much of John's early
life was spent at Sandringham with his siblings—Prince Edward
(known as David to the royal family), Prince Albert, Princess Mary,
Prince Henry and Prince George—under the care of their nanny
Charlotte "Lala" Bill.[4] Though a strict
disciplinarian,[note 2] the Prince of Wales was nonetheless
affectionate toward his children;[7] the Princess of Wales was close
to her children and encouraged them to confide in her.[8] In 1909,
John's great-aunt, the Dowager Empress of Russia wrote to her son,
Emperor Nicholas II, that "George's children are very nice ...
The little ones, George and Johnny are both charming and very amusing
..."[9] Princess Alexander of Teck described John as "very
quaint and one evening when Uncle George returned from stalking he
bent over Aunt May and kissed her, and they heard Johnny soliloquize,
'She kissed Papa, ugly old man!'"[10] George once said to U.S.
President Theodore Roosevelt that "all [his] children [were]
obedient, except John"—apparently because John alone, among
George's children, escaped punishment from their father.
Though a "large
and handsome" baby, by his fourth birthday John had become
"winsome" and "painfully slow". That same year he
suffered his first epileptic seizure and showed signs of a
disability, probably autism. When his father succeeded as George V
upon Edward VII's death in 1910, John was awarded the title "His
Royal Highness The Prince John". John did not attend his
parents' coronation on 22 June 1911, as this was considered too risky
for his health; nonetheless, cynics said that the family feared their
reputation would be damaged by any incident involving him. Although
John was deemed not "presentable to the outside world,"
George nonetheless showed an interest in him, offering him "kindness
and affection".
During his time at
Sandringham, John exhibited some repetitive behaviors as well as
regular misbehaviours and insubordination: "he simply didn't
understand he needed to [behave]." Nonetheless there was
hope his seizures might lessen with time—. Contrary to the
belief that he was hidden from the public from an early age, John for
most of his life was a "fully-fledged member of the family",
appearing frequently in public until after his eleventh birthday.
In 1912 Prince
George, who was nearest in age to John and his closest sibling, began
St. Peter's Court Preparatory School at Broadstairs. The following
summer, The Times reported that John would not attend Broadstairs the
following term, and that George and Mary had not decided whether to
send John to school at all. After the outbreak of World War I, John
rarely saw his parents, who were often away on official duties, and
his siblings, who were either at boarding school or in the military.
John slowly disappeared from the public eye and no official portraits
of him were commissioned after 1913.
Wood Farm
In 1916, as his
seizures became more frequent and severe, John was sent to live at
Wood Farm, with Bill having charge of his care. Though John
maintained an interest in the world around him and was capable of
coherent thought and expression with his lack of educational
progress the last of his tutors was dismissed and his formal
education ended. Physicians warned that he would likely not reach
adulthood.
At Wood Farm, John
became "a satellite with his own little household on an outlying
farm on the Sandringham estate ... Guests at Balmoral remember
him during the Great War as tall and muscular, but always a distant
figure glimpsed from afar in the woods, escorted by his own
retainers." His grandmother Queen Alexandra maintained a garden
at Sandringham House especially for him, and this became "one
of the great pleasures of [John]'s life."
After the summer of
1916, John was rarely seen outside the Sandringham Estate and
passed solely into Bill's care. After Queen Alexandra wrote that
"[John] is very proud of his house but is longing for a
companion," Queen Mary broke from royal practice by having local
children brought in to be playmates for John. One of these was
Winifred Thomas, a young girl from Halifax who had been sent to live
with her aunt and uncle (who had charge of the royal stables at
Sandringham) in hopes her asthma would improve. John had known
Winifred years earlier, prior to the outbreak of World War I. Now
they became close, taking nature walks together and working in Queen
Alexandra's garden. Leslie Saward Heath (born 1914 in Wolferton
Station House), whose Grandfather was Harry Leonard Saward RVM MVO,
the Royal Station Master at Wolferton from 1884-1924, also played
with Prince John at the farmhouse. John also played with his elder
siblings when they visited: once, when his two eldest brothers came
to visit John, the Prince of Wales (formerly Prince Edward) "took
him for a run in a kind of a push-cart, and they both disappeared
from view."
John, pictured on a
postcard from c. 1912-13
Death
As John's seizures
intensified (Bill later wrote) "we [dared] not let him be with
his brothers and sister, because it upsets them so much, with the
attacks getting so bad and coming so often." Biographer Denis
Judd believes that "[John]'s seclusion and 'abnormality' must
have been disturbing to his brothers and sister", as he had been
"a friendly, outgoing little boy, much loved by his brothers and
sister, a sort of mascot for the family". He spent Christmas Day
1918 with his family at Sandringham House but was driven back to
Wood Farm at night.
On 18 January 1919,
after a severe seizure, John died in his sleep at Wood Farm at 5:30
p.m. It is now known, due to modern autopsy techniques, that people
with epilepsy may die of it, with no other illness or injury
contributing to death nor to the etiology of the condition.
Queen Mary wrote in
her diary that the news was "a great shock, tho' for the poor
little boy's restless soul, death came as a great relief. [She] broke
the news to George and [they] motored down to Wood Farm. Found poor
Lala very resigned but heartbroken. Little Johnnie looked very
peaceful lying there."
Mary later wrote to
Emily Alcock, an old friend, that "for [John] it is a great
relief, as his malady was becoming worse as he grew older, & he
has thus been spared much suffering. I cannot say how grateful we
feel to God for having taken him in such a peaceful way, he just
slept quietly into his heavenly home, no pain no struggle, just peace
for the poor little troubled spirit which had been a great anxiety to
us for many years, ever since he was four years old." She went
on to add that "the first break in the family circle is hard to
bear, but people have been so kind & sympathetic & this has
helped us much." George described his son's death simply as "the
greatest mercy possible".
On 20 January the
Daily Mirror said that "when the Prince passed away his face
bore an angelic smile"; its report also made the first public
mention of John's epilepsy. His funeral was the following day at St
Mary Magdalene Church, John Neale Dalton officiating.Queen Mary wrote
that "Canon Dalton & Dr Brownhill [John's physician]
conducted the service which was awfully sad and touching. Many of our
own people and the villagers were present. We thanked all Johnnie's
servants who have been so good and faithful to him." Though
nominally private, the funeral was attended by Sandringham House
staff; "every single person on the estate went and stood around
the gates and his grave was absolutely covered in flowers."
Queen Alexandra wrote to Queen Mary that "now [their] two
darling Johnnies lie side by side".
Legacy
Prince John (right)
and Prince George photographed during a royal shopping trip.
Prince Edward who
had hardly known John, saw his death as "little more than a
regrettable nuisance." He wrote to his mistress of the time that
"[he had] told [her] all about that little brother, and how he
was an epileptic. [John]'s been practically shut up for the last two
years anyhow, so no one has ever seen him except the family, and then
only once or twice a year. This poor boy had become more of an animal
than anything else." He also wrote an insensitive letter to
Queen Mary, which has since been lost. She did not reply, but he felt
compelled to write her an apology, in which he stated that "[he
felt] like such a cold hearted and unsympathetic swine for writing
all that [he] did ... No one can realize more than [she] how poor
little Johnnie meant to [him] who hardly knew him ..." He went
on to state "I feel so much for you, darling Mama, who was his
mother." In her final mention of John in her diary, Queen Mary
wrote simply "miss the dear child very much indeed." She
gave Winifred Thomas a number of John's books, which she had
inscribed, "In memory of our dear little Prince." "Lala"
Bill always kept a portrait of John above her mantelpiece, together
with a letter from him which read "nanny, I love you."
In recent years,
Prince John's seclusion has been brought forward as evidence towards
the "heartlessness" of the Windsor family, According to a
2008 Channel 4 documentary, much of the existing information about
John is "based on hearsay and rumour, precisely because so few
details of his life and his problems have ever been disclosed,"
and the British Epileptic Association has stated, "There was
nothing unusual in what [the King and Queen] did. At that time,
people with epilepsy were put apart from the rest of the community.
They were often put in epilepsy colonies or mental institutions. It
was thought to be a form of mental illness," adding that it was
another twenty years before the idea that epileptics should not be
locked away began to take hold.[29] The royal family believed that
these afflictions flowed through their blood, which was believed to
be purer than the blood of a commoner, and, as such, wished to hide
as much as possible in regard to John's illness. Others have
suggested that John was sent to Wood Farm to give him the best
environment possible under the "austere" conditions of
World War I. Undoubtedly the royal family were "frightened and
ashamed of John's illness", and his life is "usually
portrayed either as tragedy or conspiracy". At the time that
Edward VIII (formerly Prince Edward) abdicated, an attempt was made
to discredit Prince Albert, who had succeeded as George VI, by
suggesting that he was subject to falling fits, like his brother. In
1998, after the discovery of two volumes of family photographs, John
was briefly brought to public attention.
The Lost Prince is a
British television drama about the life of Prince John – youngest
child of Britain's King George V and Queen Mary – who died at the
age of 13 in 1919.
A Talkback Thames
production written and directed by Stephen Poliakoff, it was
originally broadcast in January 2003. It won an Emmy Award in
September 2005.
John suffered from
epileptic seizures and an autism-like developmental disorder, and the
Royal Family tried to shelter him from public view; the script shied
away from presenting the Royal Family as unsympathetic, instead
showing how much this cost them emotionally (particularly John's
mother, Queen Mary). Poliakoff explores the story of John, his
relationship with his family and brother Prince George, the political
events going on at the time (such as the fall of the House of Romanov
in 1917) and the love and devotion of his nanny, Charlotte Bill.
Episode One
A spellbound young
Prince John gazes as his family attend an elaborate birthday party
for his pampered and indulged grandmother, Queen Alexandra, held at
Sandringham in Norfolk during the winter.
When summer arrives
there is much excitement again as Tsar Nicholas II, Tsarina
Alexandra, and their children, visit their relatives, the British
royals at the Isle of Wight. The Russians entrance Prince John with
their exotic splendour. It is clear, even at this stage, that
Johnnie, a charming and attractive boy, has an eccentric view of the
world and is uninhibited in a way that is alien to his parents. His
ailing grandfather, King Edward VII, loves him for his frankness. It
is clear also that his nanny, Lalla, is reluctant to reveal the
seriousness of his medical condition.
While the populace
of the capital gaze into the night skies to catch a glimpse of an
approaching comet, Johnnie's parents are called to Buckingham Palace
to be by the King's deathbed.
During the funeral
attended by all the heads of state of Europe, including the Kaiser
Wilhelm, Johnnie succumbs to a serious epileptic fit. Queen Mary,
Johnnie's mother, summons doctors to examine him and their diagnosis
confirms her and Lalla's worst fears. Lalla volunteers to look after
Johnnie to prevent him being sent to an institution. The two of them
are to be sent to Sandringham, where Johnnie is to be prevented from
encountering anybody but the closest members of his family.
His sibling, Prince
George, who has always treasured Johnnie, swears to protect him.
Johnnie, now a few years older, is deprived of the company of any
children and finds the schooling of his tutor, Hansell, unfathomable.
Although lonely, he always takes an optimistic view of life. Then one
day, to the acute embarrassment of King George V and Queen Mary, he
speaks his mind at a tea party held for Prime Minister H.H. Asquith
and his Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lloyd George.
Johnnie is summoned
to London to be re-examined by the doctors. During his stay he is
taken by his brother George up to the minstrel's gallery looking down
on the banqueting hall of Buckingham Palace, to observe a grand state
occasion. The assembled dignitaries are chattering feverishly about
the poise with which the Queen has dealt with the intrusion of a
suffragette, who has confronted the Queen to demand her support for
women's emancipation.
During the banquet
Asquith and Lloyd George are called back to Downing Street to receive
the news that is to prove to be the catalyst for the start of the
First World War.
The following
morning Johnnie receives a rare audience with his father King George,
who shows him his treasured stamp collection. Johnnie is more
interested in his father's pet parrot, Charlotte. Suddenly, father
and son are interrupted by the King's Private Secretary, Stamfordham,
who has come to relay the news of the assassination of Archduke Franz
Ferdinand in Sarajevo. Realising that the news has been withheld from
him, the King erupts in fury. Unnoticed by the adults, Johnnie
pursues Charlotte, as the terrified bird flies away into the bowels
of the building. The Queen, Lalla and George go searching for Johnnie
and his mother is shocked when she sees, for the first time, one of
Johnnie's debilitating fits. In the midst of scurrying officials
gathering for urgent diplomatic meetings, Johnnie is secreted out of
the Palace and back to the isolation of his country estate.
Episode Two
Prince George
witnesses the brinkmanship of the allies in the face of the
belligerent posture taken by Germany. Much to the surprise of all
concerned, the weak and vacillating Tsar of Russia mobilises his
troops and plunges Europe into war. Against his wishes, George is
sent to the harsh Naval Academy where his rebellious nature leads him
to question the propaganda about the cruelty of the German armed
forces.
Propaganda combined
with the disastrous consequences of the conflict on the battlefield
of Flanders turns the public's attention to the German ancestry of
the British royal family. The trauma of war is even felt by Johnnie,
Lalla and their household, who are forced to live in increased
isolation in Wood Farm, on the fringes of the Sandringham estate.
Prince George is determined, however, to maintain contact with Lalla
and his brother. He arrives to relay the news that the family is to
change its name to Windsor and that the Tsar of Russia has abdicated
and is to be exiled in Britain by the Bolshevik revolutionaries.
George is alarmed at
the reaction of his own subjects and persuades Stamfordham to press
Lloyd George to reverse the invitation to the Tsar. Johnnie dreams
innocently of his Russian cousins coming to live with him and is
being prepared by Lalla to give a recital to his parents. King George
and Queen Mary are traumatised by what follows -- the execution of
the Romanovs. Weighed down by the effects of the conflagration that
has enveloped Europe, they find consolation when their son Johnnie
dies in his unbounded optimism and unalloyed love of life. We know
that George and Lalla will be comforted every day of their lives by
remembering his pure and untarnished character.
Reception &
awards
The drama won a high
viewing figure and much praise, was released on VHS and DVD, and was
repeated on BBC One in January 2004. A further repeat showing
followed on BBC Two in January 2006. It is now occasionally shown in
two parts on the BBC cable channel UK History. Both Miranda
Richardson and Gina McKee received Best Actress nominations at the
British Academy Television Awards. The miniseries was also nominated
for BAFTA TV awards for editing (Clare Douglas), music (Adrian
Johnston), and photography (Barry Ackroyd).
After presentation
in the United States in October 2004, it won the Emmy Award for
Outstanding Miniseries in 2005. Miranda Richardson was nominated for
a Golden Globe.
It was also repeated
on BBC Two on 14 & 21 November 2009.
A
life in drama: Stephen Poliakoff
'What really
buys you freedom is being successful. So long as you deliver, they
leave you alone'
Saturday 28 November
2009 00.05 GMT
For someone best
known for Shooting the Past, a television drama apparently so slow
and un-televisual that BBC executives begged him to speed it up,
Stephen Poliakoff is a very fast talker. Sentences tumble into one
another, thoughts jerkily digress, regroup and change their angle of
attack. Ideas flit in and out of focus as all the while a plastic
drinking straw is furiously twiddled between his fingers. Outlining
details of his latest venture, Glorious 39, his first feature film
for 12 years, Poliakoff makes glancing references to George W Bush,
Bulldog Drummond, the history of the wire tap and Norfolk's evergreen
oaks in expressing his fascination and horror at the aristocratic and
establishment appeasers who, in the run-up to the second world war,
mounted a desperate last effort to do a deal with Hitler in the hope
of retaining their power and privilege.
Poliakoff's 1999
play Talk of the City had addressed the BBC's reluctance to broadcast
news of Jewish persecution in Nazi Germany before the outbreak of the
war. "But for some reason I didn't then ask the obvious question
as to what was going on in the political and aristocratic elite. I
sort of accepted that Chamberlain was this rather boring figure with
a silly umbrella and it all worked out in the end. But then I read up
on the period and found out what an incredibly close run thing it
was. There was just a tiny band of people around Churchill who were
up against most of the Tory party, the aristocracy, the royal family
and the newspaper editors of the time. My mother's family were
aristocratic Jews and leading figures in the Liberal party. If the
appeasers had won and Britain had become a Vichy-style state, she
would certainly have been taken away. I became very interested in how
close I came to not being here."
Although Poliakoff's
early plays were aggressively contemporary – "appalling
hamburger bars, subterranean discos, early versions of karaoke, neon
and violence" – it is for his idiosyncratic treatment of the
past that he is best known today. "But I didn't really write
about my Jewish background until I was into my 40s." More or
less oblique references to the Holocaust and the 1930s cropped up in
Shooting the Past (1999), Perfect Strangers (2001) and Joe's Palace
(2007) before the more direct study in Glorious 39. "So both my
parents were dead by the time I really addressed the subject,"
he says, before, for the first time, abruptly stopping the apparently
endless flow of conversation.
"It really
hadn't occurred to me until this moment that – and it's such an
obviously glaring fact now I say it – those things could be linked.
I didn't really write about Jewishness and what happened to the Jews
until my parents died."
In Perfect
Strangers, a character says: "If you dig hard enough, there are
at least three great stories in any family" and Poliakoff's use
of the family as the arena in which wider events reverberate has
became as characteristic in his work as the large mysterious houses,
the archives of sound or images, or the hidden corners of history.
Neither Churchill
nor Chamberlain feature in Glorious 39, in which the drama is played
out in the aristocratic Keyes family whose adopted daughter, played
by Romola Garai, begins by feeling "very secure in this world,
but when it begins to unstitch it happens incredibly quickly",
explains Poliakoff. "That's what happened all over Europe for
Jewish people who had lived happily among their neighbours for years.
Then it changed. In the case of Vienna, it changed within hours.
"One minute it
was a café society and everything going along nicely. Then Hitler
entered and people were watching through the windows as their Jewish
neighbours were cleaning pavements and being spat at. It shows how an
apparently civilised surface can crack open to reveal the darkness
incredibly quickly, as most recently happened in the former
Yugoslavia. We never had to face up to our antisemitism after the war
because of our brave and proud history – and it was brave and
proud. But it was a damn close run thing, and the forces trying to do
a deal were incredibly powerful. It really could have happened here."
Poliakoff was born
in London in 1952 into a home that was both "quite formal and
quite chaotic". His father's family had come to the UK from
Russia in 1924, having witnessed the revolution from their flat near
Red Square before escaping – with a diamond smuggled in a shoe –
when Stalin came to power. His inventor grandfather died when
Poliakoff was a child, but his grandmother lived on into his
adulthood telling "amazing stories that lasted only a few
seconds, which she told with absolutely no elaboration. So she'd say,
'I once saw Tolstoy and followed him down the street to see how many
people recognised him'. And that was it. She saw the first production
of The Cherry Orchard but never said a word about how it was
received."
Poliakoff's father
and grandfather's firm produced, among other things, hearing aids –
including Churchill's – and later invented the hospital bleeper.
The family were great Anglophiles even when they lived in Russia, and
Poliakoff says his father was obsessed with manners and became very
snobbish. "There was a lot of tension in the house about using
correct forks, and even into the 1990s he would kiss women's hands."
Although the business was sometimes financially precarious, the firm
bought a Rolls-Royce, which would pick Poliakoff up from school. "And
then my father would speak to the headmaster just to mention that he
had 'brought the Rolls today'."
Poliakoff had been
the only Jewish boy at his prep school and fellow pupils would watch
him carefully to see which bits of the Lord's Prayer he said. In
those days, he says, he twiddled a stick between his fingers, not a
drinking straw. His education continued at Westminster school, where
he wrote a play that was reviewed in the Times. Christopher Hampton
had just been appointed as the first resident dramatist at the Royal
Court, and part of his job was "to go prospecting". "So
I heard about this play at Westminster and went along," he says.
"Stephen was much as he is now: nervous, clearly very bright
with too many things on his mind to formulate complete sentences. His
play was extremely promising and I got the Royal Court to commission
another one from him which, in time-honoured Royal Court fashion,
they ended up deciding not to do."
Hampton remembers
even then a "distinctive writing personality. Like everyone's
first plays, it was unsophisticated and ragged round the edges –
but it had a real intensity. And then, as now, he seemed to be
slightly off the rhythm in that the work is sort of jazzy, you don't
get quite what you expect." Poliakoff says the cancelled play,
which Richard Eyre was due to direct, was his "first lesson in
how devastating showbiz can be. Shortly afterwards my mother, who was
far too interested in my career having wanted to be an actress
herself, said to me that, despite being only 17, my career 'was going
nowhere', which I thought was a bit harsh."
The following year
Poliakoff was invited to participate in a now notorious theatre
project when seven radical fringe theatre writers, including Howard
Brenton, Trevor Griffiths and David Hare, collaborated on an
experimental work, Lay By, about a rape and its consequences. "It
verged on the pornographic," Poliakoff recalls. "I had to
look up some of the sexual terms in a dictionary. I was very much the
baby of the pack and only actually contributed a few lines, but it
did have an interesting effect. Naturalism was frowned upon at the
time, and the sort of heightened realism I felt I was gravitating
towards wasn't part of their world. The others weren't terribly
interested in evoking time and place or psychological character
development, and that helped to define me, albeit in a negative way,
because at least I realised what I was not."
Poliakoff says he
has always thought of himself as being on the left. "But I never
wanted to be didactic or agitprop or even polemical. I was more
interested in celebrating complexity. I've always thought people are
more complex than the marketing men, or the political class, or the
media class give them credit for. People can contain two
contradictory ideas in their heads at the same time, so telling them
what to think at the end of a play insults their intelligence. There
are ways of showing different ways in which the world might be
ordered. But not by pointing them out. Instead you try to deal with
the complexity."
Poliakoff went up to
Cambridge to read history but left before completing his degree. He
says he was too late for 60s euphoria and optimism, and by the time
he was writing on the fringe it was against a backdrop of the "brutal
rebuilding of Britain. All those city centres torn up and redesigned
for the car, which now seems ridiculously short sighted. This all
coincided with a tottering minority Labour government held up with
IMF loans, huge industrial unrest and bombs going off in Northern
Ireland. My first big success, Hitting Town (1975), was about a
brother and sister retreating from the violence into an incestuous
night. It was private reaction to public bleakness."
That his early plays
were almost exclusively urban and contemporary he says, in hindsight,
must have been some sort of reaction against his background. "Both
of my parents were born before the first world war and had very
old-fashioned views that were quite claustrophobic. My father's love
of Georgian architecture and Rolls-Royces, my mother's fascination
with matinee idols and people like Rex Harrison, this was a 30s view
of Britain carried through into the 60s and 70s. I wanted to write
about what I saw around me."
He also wanted his
work to be seen by as large an audience as possible. He remembers
"stumbling across" Pinter's A Night Out on television when
he was 10 or 11. "I was completely alone and had no context for
it, but thought it was fascinating and also that it was the norm,
which in a way it was as 11 million other people watched it." He
says even though the Times didn't carry television reviews until well
into the 80s, "it was both sexy and artistically credible to be
on TV. Dennis Potter was already famous. John Osborne and Tom
Stoppard did television work. There were plenty of role models and I
had no problem moving between TV and theatre."
Poliakoff's
television breakthrough came in 1977 with the nuclear thriller
Stronger Than the Sun in the BBC's Play for Today slot. His 1980
television film Caught on a Train, starring Peggy Ashcroft, won a
Bafta. While he acknowledges that its success encouraged the BBC to
allow him more freedom, he also says "Everybody had more freedom
back then. There was always a bureaucratic thing about money, but no
one was ever told how to write. The tradition was to put on the
writer's vision."
But by the time he
returned to television in the late 90s, after a period working in the
theatre and making feature films, both he and the medium had changed.
Breaking the Silence, his 1984 RSC tragicomic play set on a train
just after the Russian revolution, had been his first serous attempt
to deal with both his, and the continent's history. "Then
Michael Jackson [controller of BBC1 at the time] said he wanted
something that people would remember. Which did make me a bit cross
because I thought I'd done that once or twice already. But I did
attempt to write something completely different to what was on
television." Written and directed by Poliakoff, Shooting the
Past starred Timothy Spall and Lindsay Duncan in a story about a
battle for a picture library. It was written in irregular length
episodes with long, slow scenes that lingered over photographs and
faces.
"I wanted to
fight the idea that people couldn't concentrate for long, and when it
was finished all hell did break loose. By now they did try to tell
you how to write, and some relatively junior executives thought it
should be cut and made quicker, which would have ruined the whole
point of it. I went bananas and eventually won the battle. So it
wasn't a question of being invited by the BBC to do what I liked.
"People did try
to interfere, but I resisted them and was ultimately proved right."
He followed up with the Bafta winning Perfect Strangers (2001) the
Emmy winning The Lost Prince (2003) and Golden Globes for Gideon's
Daughter (2005). "What really buys you freedom is being
successful. So long as you deliver, they leave you alone."
Lorraine Heggessey,
a former head of BBC1 and now chief executive of Talkback Thames,
Poliakoff's long-time producers, says the degree of control he
exercises is indeed exceptional. "The fashion for some time, and
I've been part of this myself, is to edit everybody. You give them
input to 'improve' their work. And in most cases it works. But
sometimes you can also dilute things and you lose some of the
original artistic vision. Stephen's vision remains intact and his
work, in the theatre or on television or in the cinema, is instantly
recognisable. And anyway, such is his personality that it's difficult
not to let him do his own thing. He cares so much and puts so much
into his work that of course there can be tensions. But someone once
said to me: 'Work with the best, not the easiest.' And who are we to
judge? You get the brilliance because of the purity of vision."
Poliakoff still
expresses strong opinions about TV drama – most recently when he
identified "Kafkaesque committees" at the BBC – and
enjoys talking shop about Saturday night schedules, the impact of
DVDs and reminiscing about the time, not so long ago, when The Lost
Prince premiered against ITV's big gun of A Touch of Frost and
between them pulled in 21 million people.
His next project
will be a new stage play – "contemporary and urban" –
and in future he intends to work simultaneously in the theatre, film
and television. "I have some ideas for more movies, but I'm not
giving up television. I want to write a 20th-century story but I
might not direct it, as I just won't have the time. The alternative
is not to write for television at all, and I have so many more things
I want to do. But not a single person I've told believes that I'll be
able to let go enough to allow someone else to direct. We'll see. I'm
interested myself to see how it turns out."
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