#53 Damp Squib
24/02/21 22:15
Years ago, when Square Eyes was but a twinkle in my eye, I had a job interview with Stephen Poliakoff. It was for some sort of research assistant position, and the opportunity arose in a roundabout way through the company I was working for. At that point, I was developing entertainment formats – quizzes, reality shows and the like – and was definitely not in the field of portentous period dramas. I’d barely heard of Poliakoff, being more likely to watch Shipwrecked than Perfect Strangers. In other words, I was really not suited for the position.
But obviously, when I realised who he was, I fancied myself in the role; assiduously helping him with his research, maybe writing a scene or two on his behalf and becoming his muse (give me a break, I was 23 and permanently drunk). So I gorged my way through a Poliakoff-fest over three days, and slowly (very slowly) convinced myself that he was an odd kind of a genius. For most of it, I felt jarred and distracted, but there were moments that left me weeping and marvelling. The photo sequences in Shooting the Past are miraculous, and only partly because Lindsay Duncan is a goddess.
How did the interview pan out, you ask? Well, let’s say neither of us came out of it well, and leave it at that. I went back to designing shows like Sun, Sex and Suspicious Parents, and Poliakoff went on to make The Lost Prince, which followed his pattern – kind of dull and weird, but intriguing, with a wonderful ending. I was keen to watch his latest piece, Summer of Rockets, to see if he’d broken his own mould – plus it’s got Keeley Hawes in it, who one day I am going to marry. So I boarded the Poliakoff train again, to see where it took me.
Of course, everyone in it is brilliant – a cornucopia of Britain’s finest actors at the peak of their talents. And those talents are certainly put to good use. Such a lively, sunny script, and it’s all so real, you know? Funny and warm... Hang on, sorry, I was back in Shipwrecked again there. Fuck me, Summer of Rockets is stilted. Did anyone talk like that, even in the 1950s? The dialogue is absurdly clunky, reverberating round those enormous houses and ballrooms as if the echo of it is going to have even more underlying meaning – the aural equivalent of a nose tap. So, when I say the actors’ talents are being put to good use, I mean they’re working bloody hard to make a decent fist of it all. I thought Toby Stephens was excellent as Samuel Petrukhin, the inventor-cum-useless spy, and liked the Petrukhin business, manufacturing hearing aids and designing a revolutionary new paging system. It was original, unexpected, and rather charming. Keeley is as marvellous as ever despite having wiggy red hair, and Sasha, Samuel’s little boy, is beyond cute.
Narratively, it’s pretty bizarre – Samuel deciding a Doberman called Guy is a Soviet spy because he understands conversational Russian, par example. Or Keeley’s Kathleen going on a vegetarian wild goose chase. It’s all slightly off-centre, outside the field of reality – people saying things they just wouldn’t say, doing things they wouldn’t do. Sometimes the weirdness works well, in that the scenarios at least escape any accusation of cliché – Timothy Spall stroking a pet donkey as he murmurs threats to Petrukhin, a room of bride-like debutantes curtsying to a giant cake, a war hero MP driving a car into his guests during a fishing party as a jape. As a rule, I like oddness because it’s more inclined to be interesting, but in this case the peculiarity is just as likely to be dull, or just baffling.
For most of the series, I was on a see-saw between vague interest and bewilderment, with a pivot of faint tedium. There’s a sinister undertone to the whole thing, and the espionage storyline, while surreal, is gripping enough to keep you watching. Ultimately, I guess I was hooked because I was holding out for a breath-taking moment – the bit where Lindsay Duncan shows me a photo of a girl at a Nazi rally and then tells the story of her life in pictures, leaving me a sobbing mess.
That moment was sadly absent. The sixth and final episode descended even further into senseless farce, and I really couldn’t get a handle on what anyone was doing or why they were doing it. Mad generals driving tanks round English forests, a family torn apart by secret vegetarianism, absurdly loose-tongued lords, and a TV sketch undermining a bloodless coup – it was BONKERS, and boring to boot. None of it felt real, and yet, as I understand it, the story was semi-autobiographical. How Stephen Poliakoff could take his own family history and make it so inauthentic and detached from reality is as mystifying as the drama he produced.
If only he’d hired me, eh? I could have set him straight. But then the world would have missed out on gems like Emergency Bikers, The Truth About Size Zero and Your Face or Mine. So maybe it was for the best.
But obviously, when I realised who he was, I fancied myself in the role; assiduously helping him with his research, maybe writing a scene or two on his behalf and becoming his muse (give me a break, I was 23 and permanently drunk). So I gorged my way through a Poliakoff-fest over three days, and slowly (very slowly) convinced myself that he was an odd kind of a genius. For most of it, I felt jarred and distracted, but there were moments that left me weeping and marvelling. The photo sequences in Shooting the Past are miraculous, and only partly because Lindsay Duncan is a goddess.
How did the interview pan out, you ask? Well, let’s say neither of us came out of it well, and leave it at that. I went back to designing shows like Sun, Sex and Suspicious Parents, and Poliakoff went on to make The Lost Prince, which followed his pattern – kind of dull and weird, but intriguing, with a wonderful ending. I was keen to watch his latest piece, Summer of Rockets, to see if he’d broken his own mould – plus it’s got Keeley Hawes in it, who one day I am going to marry. So I boarded the Poliakoff train again, to see where it took me.
Of course, everyone in it is brilliant – a cornucopia of Britain’s finest actors at the peak of their talents. And those talents are certainly put to good use. Such a lively, sunny script, and it’s all so real, you know? Funny and warm... Hang on, sorry, I was back in Shipwrecked again there. Fuck me, Summer of Rockets is stilted. Did anyone talk like that, even in the 1950s? The dialogue is absurdly clunky, reverberating round those enormous houses and ballrooms as if the echo of it is going to have even more underlying meaning – the aural equivalent of a nose tap. So, when I say the actors’ talents are being put to good use, I mean they’re working bloody hard to make a decent fist of it all. I thought Toby Stephens was excellent as Samuel Petrukhin, the inventor-cum-useless spy, and liked the Petrukhin business, manufacturing hearing aids and designing a revolutionary new paging system. It was original, unexpected, and rather charming. Keeley is as marvellous as ever despite having wiggy red hair, and Sasha, Samuel’s little boy, is beyond cute.
Narratively, it’s pretty bizarre – Samuel deciding a Doberman called Guy is a Soviet spy because he understands conversational Russian, par example. Or Keeley’s Kathleen going on a vegetarian wild goose chase. It’s all slightly off-centre, outside the field of reality – people saying things they just wouldn’t say, doing things they wouldn’t do. Sometimes the weirdness works well, in that the scenarios at least escape any accusation of cliché – Timothy Spall stroking a pet donkey as he murmurs threats to Petrukhin, a room of bride-like debutantes curtsying to a giant cake, a war hero MP driving a car into his guests during a fishing party as a jape. As a rule, I like oddness because it’s more inclined to be interesting, but in this case the peculiarity is just as likely to be dull, or just baffling.
For most of the series, I was on a see-saw between vague interest and bewilderment, with a pivot of faint tedium. There’s a sinister undertone to the whole thing, and the espionage storyline, while surreal, is gripping enough to keep you watching. Ultimately, I guess I was hooked because I was holding out for a breath-taking moment – the bit where Lindsay Duncan shows me a photo of a girl at a Nazi rally and then tells the story of her life in pictures, leaving me a sobbing mess.
That moment was sadly absent. The sixth and final episode descended even further into senseless farce, and I really couldn’t get a handle on what anyone was doing or why they were doing it. Mad generals driving tanks round English forests, a family torn apart by secret vegetarianism, absurdly loose-tongued lords, and a TV sketch undermining a bloodless coup – it was BONKERS, and boring to boot. None of it felt real, and yet, as I understand it, the story was semi-autobiographical. How Stephen Poliakoff could take his own family history and make it so inauthentic and detached from reality is as mystifying as the drama he produced.
If only he’d hired me, eh? I could have set him straight. But then the world would have missed out on gems like Emergency Bikers, The Truth About Size Zero and Your Face or Mine. So maybe it was for the best.
- Summer of Rockets, BBC Two (and Netflix), 6 episodes
