Private Passions

Michael Berkeley talks to the playwright and director Stephen Poliakoff. Poliakoff made his mark as a playwright very early; he began writing plays as a schoolboy and got first review in The Times when he was only seventeen. However, it's as a television scriptwriter and director that Poliakoff is now best-known, with series such as 'Shooting the Past', 'Dancing on the Edge' and more recently, 'Close to the Enemy'. He has had a major role in nineteen television dramas and films to date, broadcast over the last forty years, and though they all have different settings, there's a strong atmosphere in common. Filmed in strange dream-like locations - old train carriages, empty country houses, abandoned ballrooms - they explore how the past haunts the present.