PROFILE: STEPHEN POLIAKOFF: A Prince of Drama Turns His Gaze on to a Royal Secret

Beginning of article

In Britain, television is still regarded widely as a low-brow medium for low-brow people, an art-form that cannot hold its own against the novel, the stage or, say, painting. There are, however, a handful of TV dramatists who will undoubtedly be studied in 50 years, just as today we study the work of the great early Hollywood directors once similarly dismissed as providers of mindless pap.

When the project of shaping a TV canon begins, the name of Stephen Poliakoff will undoubtedly be viewed reverentially as an exponent of unashamedly highbrow TV, an auteur to take his place with Dennis Potter as the creator of some of the most powerful and meditative drama on the small …