Why I Wish the Crocodiles Had Eaten the Friends

The BBC calls it "epic" and "extraordinary"(1), the Grauniad thinks it "fabulous", everyone hails Stephen Poliakoff as one of the finest TV writers ever (conveniently forgetting such horrors as The Tribe), so why is it that watching "Friends and Crocodiles" left me fuming at an utterly empty experience wholly devoid of any real meaning? Why is it that the more I watch of Poliakoff the less I see.

All the usual Poliakoff tics and tropes were present in Friends and Crocodiles - the overcareful framing of every shot, the Greenaway-esque painterly references wholly lacking in Greenaway's off-kilter humour, the overlong shots of empty corridors. Still on that last point, I strongly suspect that with these shots, Poliakoff thinks he is using some powerful visual metaphor for the emptiness of modern society/modern relationships/modern souls, in fact he is showing an empty corridor ... at length. And don't get me started on the traditional "solitary figure, bisecting the frame as he/she stands in the rain, head slightly tilted to one side" - an image with all the subtlety of a flag-burning.

And then there's the script. I don't know whether our esteemed writer/director is aware of this but - outside of Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and Freshers Days - very few people think it appropriate to spend their time giving their whole biography to any passing stranger. In Poliakoff land, everybody has their complete "Who's Who" reference ready to trip off their tongue. Within moments of being spotted by Gatsby-esque Paul (nicely acted by Damian Lewis) walking across his land, conventional Lizzie (even better acted by Jodhi May) is announcing "I often walk across this land. I work in an Estate Agent in [names town], so I know all about you and your property. Always buying this and that". I really thought that Austin Powers's Basil Exposition character had done away this kind of thing, but presumably that kind of reference would be far too lowbrow for Mr Poliakoff. Later, at a party a character takes it upon himself to announce to Lizzie "My sister's enjoying herself. Good luck to her. She's been disabled from birth you know". At Lizzie's wedding, characters wander around telling each other things they must already know like "It is a double celebration", "Yes it is, Lizzie has just got a job at AET", "Yes, I arranged that".

In fact, the overemphatic underscore is Poliakoff's most obvious trait. Here are some samples to go with the above:

1. Paul - a Quixotic figure - shows Lizzie round his disorganised workroom, which is covered in designs for windmills. "Perhaps I'm Don Quixote" he muses.
   
2. That Gatsby thing: we see Paul meandering around in front of the pool beside his stately pile, dressed in a white suit as he gazes out on the assorted lotus eaters arranged about the place in suits (men) and skimpy bikinis (a selection of tall, leggy women(2)). I've never read the book and I've never seen the film but even I got the reference to The Great Gatsby, but just in case I didn't there was Poliakoff, forcing one of his characters to tell Lizzie "He really has turned into Gatsby"
3. The passing of time, assorted examples here: Lizzie answering a call from Paul "It's 18 months since I saw you in the street that day"; the need to flag up huge mobile phones and computers in the late 80's, pagers and AIDS deaths (with the completely gratuitous comment "Graham died ... the poet ... of AIDS") in the early 90's; comments like "they've destroyed the whole company ... in just 2 years". It's clumsy, clumsy, clumsy writing.
4. One of those Gatsby-style parties was prefigured by a lengthy close up on a wasp chewing at the remains of a half-nibbled sugar mouse - yet another metaphorical howitzer used to obliterate a peanut.
5. The Greek chorus. He's lost without his Greek chorus is our Steve, or at least he fears that we, the poor, dumb audience may be. We see a GEC-like company suffering a GEC like fall. We see it investing in the internet before the collapse We see it shafting its workforce. We see the outrage at the AGM as the company is forced to 'fess up. We get the message. Yet still Poliakoff has to ram the point home, setting three figures up on a balcony to look down and solemnly intone "It is amazing what they have done", "A great company destroyed in two years", "How can clever people be so stupid?", "A lot of people have lost their jobs".

Next up there's the undergraduate-essay pretension, exemplified in characters like the (Amazonian, natch) women who accompany Paul through the first two-thirds of the film. There's the character with Aspergers Syndrome(3) given, in his simplicity, to a deeper understanding than all about him, thus endowing banal statements such as "He is the minister, he must make the first speech" with some mysterious significance. And I still haven't mentioned the academic working on a book he seems doomed never to finish or the disabled woman who become's Paul's co-lover in a menages-a-trois on an Edenic farm. With regard to the latter of these two, we are constantly reminded of her disability (see above) so it seems in some way significant to Poliakoff, but what exactly that significance is he never chooses to make clear.

And then there are the themes: the conventional figure lost amid the sybarites, the old vs the new, the mindlessness of a certain form of capitalism (in Poliakoff land capitalism is a marvellous thing, but only in the hands of mercurial booklovers given to sending exquisitely tasteful swan boats gliding across wine-dark lakes). All these are illustrated by the author gazing back over the past 30 years and using the spurious genius of hindsight to suggest that he was somehow aware of what would happen all along by ramming home again the lessons we have all been forced to learn since the 1970's. Thus Poliakoff panders to the natural small-c conservatism of the broadsheet film and TV reviewers, using attacks on allegedly culture-destroying and faceless big business to distract them while he produces yet another pretty, but ultimately empty 110 minutes.



(1) it has an excuse, it paid for the thing to be made.
(2) Poliakoff productions don't do any other sort of woman. Women under five foot eight don't exist in Poliakoff land. Also on this point, given that the film followed a 20 year journey, I was amazed that in all those years Jodhi May's character wore only one costume that didn't show off her (admittedly fabulous) legs and that sole exception was presumably on the sole ground that it was a wedding dress.
(3) you can tell he has Asperger's syndrome because he wears the traditional costume department uniform for Asperger's: thick-rimmed glasses, stripy jumper, ill-fitting polyester blouson.