Matthew Macfadyen dans 'Peter Kosminsky: The South Bank Show'

Peter Kosminsky: The South Bank Show
Tomorrow on ITV 1 from 10:15pm to 11:15pm
Melvyn Bragg talks to the Bafta-winning director of The Government Inspector about his career and film-making technique. Kosminsky discusses his political upbringing, travels to Bosnia - the setting for his war drama Warriors - and reveals why he made Britz, a film about Britain's anti-terrorism legislation. Contributors include Mark Rylance, Ken Loach, David Aukin, Matthew Macfadyen, and Brooke Kinsella, star of Kosminsky's 1997 piece No Child of Mine SUB

Curiously, Fighting Passions threw some retrospective light on Warriors, the terrific Peter Kosminsky drama about Bosnian peacekeepers who found themselves powerless to intervene as civilians were massacred. If they'd only been permitted to shoot someone at the time, you found yourself thinking, they'd probably have come back in a better frame of mind. Kosminksy was the subject of The South Bank Show this week, and his recollections of the "golden era of Yorkshire and Granada", a time when ITV companies could fairly claim to lead the way in certain branches of serious programme-making, had a rather ironic edge given the terminal prognosis of the programme in which he was appearing. It included a rather startling moment when Kosminsky, recalling the intensity of his own youthful politics, acknowledged that the fictional suicide bomber in his drama Britz had taken "a route that I chickened out of taking".

Happily, he decided to pursue subversion by means of drama rather than by high explosives – though his dramas do generally result in a loud bang. This film ended with a curious abruptness, just as you expected it to look ahead to Kosminsky's forthcoming project, about Palestine. Either Kosminsky's playing his cards close to his chest or they wanted to make sure he made it into the final series.