Stephen Poliakoff: A prince of drama turns his gaze

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 screen.

Like Potter, Poliakoff is one of those artists whose personal life, political views and artistic achievements are so tightly intertwined as to be inseparable.

There is a sense in all his work – the television, theatre and films – of the long, dark European 20th century as an integral back-story, an essential (if often unspoken) tool for understanding his characters. This might be, at least in part, because his own family were at the centre of so many of its key events. His 1984 play Breaking the Silence was based on his paternal grandfather's life, a man who was one of the first people ever to record sound on film and who, living on Manezh Square, in the centre of Moscow, saw the Russian Revolution unfold from his window.

He fled Russia with his children in 1924, when Stalin came to power, with nothing but a diamond concealed in his shoe. As a Jew, Poliakoff also has family links to the catastrophe that was to unfold in Germany – a catastrophe that haunts great swaths of his writing.

Alex Poliakoff, Stephen's father, set up an electronics firm that was, an old family friend explains, "very much an old-style, paternalistic employer. Alex was an entrepreneur and an inventor but he was very much informed by a Reithian public service ethos that, in a way, so much of Stephen's work is a lament for".

"Ina, Stephen's actress mother, was," the friend says, "a tall, elegant and very posh lady with cut-glass vowels, quite fearsome really but certainly not unpleasant. She had an air of upper-middle class bohemia about her." She once told Stephen that "your career is going nowhere" – when he was 17.

The Poliakoffs' was a household with an aristocratic mien – a cultivated and wealthy Russian-Jewish family that had homes both in London and the country. Stephen was the third of five very close children, all of whom have become eminent in their fields: academia, medicine and museum curation. Stephen was "the black sheep of the family", a friend explains, "because he was the artistic one. That side of him was viewed, I think, with a combination of affection and exasperation – and, as he became successful, surprised admiration."

Intense, strange family relationships occur in all his works, the most extreme examples being, of course, his two fictional explorations of incest: the 1976 TV play Hitting Town and later – and far more controversially – in Close My Eyes, a 1992 film starring Clive Owen. "The particular closeness that develops between siblings in childhood that then either completely vanishes or remains for life is something I find haunting," Stephen explained.

Poliakoff's father initially feared deportation, and never quite felt safe or settled in Britain – a quality that Poliakoff acknowledges he might have inherited. The relationship between father and son was – as in so many of the writer's dramas – not warm. "As a child, I had some extraordinary rows with him," he has admitted, "and I was filled with moments of deep hate. I suppose that's affected how I write."

His latest work, the remarkable two-part BBC series The Lost Prince, is Poliakoff's first work to be based explicitly on a true story, and this one explores one of the oddest families of all: the Windsors. The central character is George V's son Prince John, the "lost" royal who was hidden away for most of his 14-year long life because he suffered from epilepsy and a form of autism. There are echoes here, too, of Poliakoff's own life. Prince John's elder brother, Prince George, was sent away to a boarding school he despised, despite pleading with his father – a situation Stephen also found himself in.

Stephen's school, it should be said, was the very upper middle class Westminster School. And his own career was a classic trajectory through Cambridge University (where he read history before leaving, after two years, on seeing his first play achieve a successful commercial run at the Traverse Theatre, in Edinburgh) to becoming the National Theatre's writer in residence at the age of 24.

Poliakoff's latest decision to write about monarchy seems almost a logical progression, given that his previous drama, Perfect Strangers, beautifully dramatised the power of genealogy over our individual mind-sets. It also seems to provide again more of the back-story to his earlier works: as he shows the years leading up to the First World War, and then (distantly, off-screen) the conflict itself, it is hard not to think of the ripple-effects that these events had on his characters in other works. Poliakoff, more than any other TV writer I can think of, has work that can be viewed as a coherent whole.

Telling at last the story of Prince John is a continuation of his almost Proustian obsession with the fragility of memory and with lost or forgotten history.

Dusty archives are one powerful recurring symbol of this. In one of his early films, Hidden City, he latched on to the extraordinary fact that below London there are tunnels where confidential government archives going back to the turn of the century have been dumped for want of space.

"They've forgotten where a lot of the secrets are," the writer said at the time – a key Poliakoff phrase that could apply to any of his works – "hence many times people's medical records or government secrets are found blowing along towpaths because they've escaped through some orifice from where they were stored and forgotten."

His 1999 play, Remember This, centres on Swiss entrepreneurs who plan to construct a digital archive of home videos. In Shooting the Past, his 1999 TV masterpiece, a vast photographic archive is threatened when it is bought by a US corporation, which plans to destroy all but the parts which can be flogged off and turn the premises into a business school. In Poliakoff's work there is a profound, almost aristocratic, fear of the market and its power to destroy. This is also reflected in his fierce criticism of John Birt's impact on the BBC.

He sees the introduction of market mechanisms into the corporation as an instrument of vulgarisation and cheapening, and he has been surprisingly outspoken in his criticisms of his main employer. But he has also been astute enough to note that the BBC has always had Birtist elements: his 1998 play, The Talk of the City, showed how market-minded managers discouraged the reporting of Jewish persecution in Nazi Germany because the Thirties equivalent of focus-group research indicated that "people didn't want to hear about that sort of thing".

Similarly, he was extremely critical of the BBC's decision to purge some of its archives to free up space – to such an extent that it became the starting point for writing Shooting the Past. The idea that money should override memory, that the new should trump the old, is something that causes him clear anxiety. The Queen in The Lost Prince, played by Miranda Richardson, says that she "finds everything that is modern hideous, so I find solace in the old".

And there is clearly a certain sympathy for this view on the part of the author, who once described himself as being "radically old-fashioned", a neat paradox that captures his outlook perfectly. In one interview, he explained that in Shooting the Past "somebody 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" – and this is something that Poliakoff manages by being radically old-fashioned and refusing to change.

Poliakoff is very much a European writer, then, anxious about the newness and the apparent amnesia of American culture. His 1980 film, Caught on a Train, was an exploration of the British people's apparent inability to engage properly with the European mainland. Another symptom of Americanisation that Poliakoff's work is consciously reacting against is the remorseless speeding up of life. "I proposed," he said of Shooting the Past and his subsequent work, "bloody-mindedly, I suppose, to compel audiences to slow down. I wanted to go back to long scenes – not six-second takes."

Poliakoff's work cannot, however, be interpreted as that of a conventional conservative or a right-winger.

The Lost Prince will cause discomfort in Britain's palaces. Poliakoff brings to public attention the fact that the Windsor family persistently lied to the British people when they claimed – right up until the 1980s when historian Kenneth Rose established the truth – that it had been Lloyd George's government that refused to offer sanctuary to the Romanov family. In fact, the initiative came straight from Buckingham Palace, where the royals were more concerned for the future of their own icy institution, than they were for their own cousins.

Similarly, although Poliakoff desists from drawing crude contemporary parallels, his latest drama exposes the cruelty that the institution of monarchy inflicts upon the individuals at its heart. In The Lost Prince, George V is shown to have been a petulant and rather ignorant man who was cruelly indulged by everybody around him to such an extent that his personality became, to say the least, warped.

The parallels with our own Prince of Wales (or, as the tabloids have quite accurately dubbed him, the Prince of Wails) are plain. On the strength of The Lost Prince, the works of Stephen Poliakoff are most unlikely ever to be forgotten in the dusty archive of his nightmares.

LIFE STORY

Born: In Kensington, London, 1952, to Ina, an English actress, and Alexander, a Russian émigré entrepreneur.

Family: Married to Sandy Welch; they have one son and one daughter.

Education: Westminster School, London; studied history at King's College, Cambridge, but gave up his degree in 1971 when his first play, A Day With My Sister, was staged at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh.

Theatre, film and television career: Has written more than 30 plays and films – recent highlights include: Close My Eyes (1992); The Tribe (1998); Talk of the City (1999); Perfect Strangers (2001); The Lost Prince, soon to be shown by the BBC.

Awards: Most promising playwright at the Evening Standard Drama Awards, in 1975; in 1976, at the age of 24, he became writer in residence at the National Theatre; Bafta in 1980 for Caught on a Train; Evening Standard best film for Close My Eyes, 1992; Prix Italia for Shooting The Past 1999; given the Dennis Potter Award at last year's Baftas.

He says: "The voice of the writer has been squashed and diminished over the years with the death – or semi-death – of the single play."

They say: "He's quite simple, in a way, very down to earth" – Clive Owen, who acted in Close My Eyes and Century

"I don't know if he was 19 or 17 or 12, he was very young and very arrogant" – Michael Rudman, who commissioned Poliakoff's first professional play, when director of the Traverse Theatre, in 1971