11.14 | Lunch with the FT: Shortening Audience Attention Spans
Stephen Poliakoff is best known for his dark, leisurely paced television dramas, full of nuance and foreboding.
He is proud that his 1999 play on BBC2, 'Shooting the Past', about the threatened destruction of a photographic archive when the building that houses it is bought by an American property developer, achieved the same ratings as '24', the scarily fast-paced American series starring Kiefer Sutherland. "If you do something that is particular, and fairly unhurried, to put it mildly, you will get the audience, which likes to feel its intelligence is not being insulted."
Did he feel threatened by the way works such as '24' were shortening audience attention spans?
"No. As everything gets more and more homogenised, there is a strong appetite among a sizeable quantity of people for work that lasts in the mind. There are so many hit movies that people forget as soon as they cross the foyer. There is a hunger for things that register."
Piffle. Peter Aspden, the FT writer, seems to have a chip on his shoulder about '24', yet Poliakoff himself seems to avoid slagging off the series. Maybe he's a fan? If so, hello Stephen!
He is proud that his 1999 play on BBC2, 'Shooting the Past', about the threatened destruction of a photographic archive when the building that houses it is bought by an American property developer, achieved the same ratings as '24', the scarily fast-paced American series starring Kiefer Sutherland. "If you do something that is particular, and fairly unhurried, to put it mildly, you will get the audience, which likes to feel its intelligence is not being insulted."
Did he feel threatened by the way works such as '24' were shortening audience attention spans?
"No. As everything gets more and more homogenised, there is a strong appetite among a sizeable quantity of people for work that lasts in the mind. There are so many hit movies that people forget as soon as they cross the foyer. There is a hunger for things that register."
