La revue de presse

When it comes to this trio, I am badly biased. When I first saw it in 2001, I thought Perfect Strangers was one of the most outstanding things I had ever seen on television. Watching it again now on DVD, it looks even better. It is an exquisite evocation of the secrecy, the hidden passions and frustrated longings that make up a family. (The series was, in part, the inspiration for me to uncover some of my own family history, for a forthcoming book.)

Poliakoff elicits flawless performances from his cast, notably Michael Gambon, Lindsay Duncan and Timothy Spall, but the signature moments come in sequences with actors who barely speak. We are told, as children might be told a family legend, of the two evacuee girls who fled their foster parents and ended up living as wild children, foraging for food in the Midlands countryside. They are now the elderly aunts, Violet and Edith - forever armed with their own ample supply of biscuits, lest they ever go hungry again.

Perfect Strangers is full of moments like that, when a secret from the past floods the present with light. But it is the pictures that tell the story. For Poliakoff does something almost unique in contemporary television: he slows it down. His scenes are long, defying every rule about the short attention span of the viewer. ("The audience is more intelligent than it's given credit for, that's one of my defining beliefs.") Testing the idea to the limit, he delivers key turning points with no action at all: by letting his camera linger on a photograph.
"There is something magical about a film camera looking at a still; you can't help but be drawn to it. Something about the luminosity of it," he says. In Perfect Strangers, more successfully even than in Shooting the Past, he manages to build an emotional climax from the simple combination of musical score and black-and-white snap. (The music by Adrian Johnston is a crucial part of the magic formula, giving some of these moments their haunting power.)

When I saw it, I almost could not believe something this good was on television. Shouldn't it have been in a more serious medium, I thought; shouldn't it have been a film?

There is a curious air of Alice in Wonderland about Daniel's encounters with strange, exotic and commanding creatures, notably Timothy Spall, leaping up and down in an abandoned house like a terrifying gnome. Two more courses to come. A banquet.