Friends & Crocodiles

This piece seems to have divided the audience and critics. We have seen and heard more negative reviews than positive ones.

We thought it was a very interesting and enjoyable piece. As so often with Poliakoff, he creates characters who don't behave as you expect them to. They infuriate and they surprise you.

In this epic piece, spanning some 20 years (early eighties to early naughties)Poliakoff examines themes of business, friendships and survival in a fast-changing world.

Crocodiles are an interesting metaphor for survival and coping with change/trauma.

So are friends, both the loyal and the relatively fair-weather variety. Both types are on display here.

Drama about business is usually horribly infuriating because the playwright has little or no insight into how business really works. Similarly technology. Poliakoff understands business and technology far better than most writers.

Of course the piece simplifies and takes positions on these issues - who wants a 20 parter on such subjects - but the piece works excellently well as a sub 2 hour film for TV.

Several critics said that they "just don't get it" with this piece. I feel sorry for them if that is really the case. Perhaps most critics, like most writers, have little understanding of business and/or technology.

The acting is excellent - Damien Lewis (everywhere these days) and Jodhi May predictably good. A few cameos for old favourites too.

The cinematography is just stunning - Poliakoff is probably now at the very top of his game in this aspect of his work.

It's big canvas stuff, it is truly beautiful to look at and it leaves you plenty to think about and talk about afterwards.

We need more of this quality of stuff on TV and cinema please!! And this piece will last. Some of those who "don't get it" just now will, in a few years time, be hailing it as a classic and repeating it for decades to come. It's that sort of piece.

While looking and feeling like big production TV from the BBC the central question marks are really the pivot points of Friends and Crocodiles.

Set initially in the a multi-millionaire's world of bizarre parties and meaningless hedonism it is a timeless journey into one man and one woman's counterbalancing act. He wild. She composed. He unorganized. She overly so etc;

The Eighties in Britain were a time of an implosion of time and security, and rapidly followed by immense greed. On the flip-side of this was a vast sub-culture spawned by the rejection or denial of access to the success of Thatcherite policies.

But this is not a film about politics, or even economics, and it has a strong surreal edge to it - it is definitely worth viewing for the juxtaposition between the work ethic - protestant, bourgeois, uptight - and the new entrepreneur - free-wheeling, charismatic, and mesmerizing.

Largely successful Poliakoff writes a great visual script and directs in sweeping tranches of panoramic vistas - this is largely a film based on ken Russell's sensibilities of what make film work - it is bold, and fun, but for my taste at the end of the day - a bit like the Eighties themselves - had loads of style but the substance is obscure...

It works best in the unreal world of parties and we thought it fell apart when the parties ended. Brilliant first half. Weaker second.

The rise and fall and redemption are too commonplace - here the acting should have had power rather than a footnote to the parties - and we were left wondering if,like the Eighties, it was all a bad hangover and a fitful night.

I can usually appreciate a good Poliakoff TV drama, but this one left me cold and even disinterested. I normally enjoy Damian Lewis's work as well, but his rather detached Paul left me not caring at all about what became of him; the quirky and enigmatic smile became irritating and more importantly, conveyed nothing at all. I felt that Jodhi May held the whole thing together; she seemed to have been written as the point-of-view character through whose eyes we see the ebb and flow of Paul's life, whilst at the same time we observe her rise and rise in the business world, something the self-sabotaging Paul could only envy.

Poliakoff generally sets his stories against a backdrop of historical social and political change. In 'Friends & Crocodiles' the social change covers the time from the hedonistic 1980's to the bursting of the dot com bubble. For me, I felt somewhat irrelevant as a viewer as the narrative dipped in and out of events in time. I believe that Poliakoff was too ambitious in attempting to create a cohesive story covering this time span in only 110 minutes of screen time. The reasons for the shortness of story-telling time may well have been financial - or whatever - but for me, this movie just didn't work, and in the end I didn't care what happened to any of the characters.

I really, really love Stephen Poliakoff's work, but I hope 'Friends & Crocodiles' remains the sole exception.

Friends and Crocodiles follows the career of Paul, a brilliant entrepreneur who has made his fortune from retail. As well as being talented, he is also feckless and unstable. We open in 1981, when Paul is the owner of a beautiful country house set in a vast estate (echoes of Richard Branson's purchase of The Manor near Oxford a few years earlier). We then follow Paul's volatile career, which becomes intertwined with that of Lizzie, a talented manager, whom he recruits as his PA from a local estate agent. She brings order to the chaos of the house, which Paul has filled with an assortment of freaks who are all expecting to make it big in something. Lizzie storms out of his employment after a stunt at one of Paul's parties puts people in danger and as the years progress their paths cross at intervals, their relationship slowly mutating into one of grudging mutual respect. Despite the chaos he creates around him, it is his judgement that she ends up respecting, against the entrenched wisdom of the whole business establishment.

The film is a sharp, accurate and very involving tour of Britain over the last quarter century, through the high noon of Thatcherism, the wobbling confidence of the Major years, the dot com boom and the subsequent meltdown, through to the present. The lunacies, the technologies, the pain and the silliness. Maybe you had to live through it and suffer with it for Friends and Crocodiles to work. But even without that it's a vision very difficult to ignore.

Nowhere on television have I seen colour used as it is here. Almost every shot is a work of art, which of course makes it sound pretentious. It isn't pretentious on screen -- just a succession of startling, highly unusual and often very beautiful images. In some ways reminiscent of Fellini's movies, but more rooted in the everyday.

Underpinning it are the expert performances of Damian Lewis as Paul and Jodhi May as Lizzie, which are crisp, sharp and utterly believable.

I honestly thought that this was one of the greatest films I have ever had the pleasure of watching. Is it just me or are the general public getting less intelligent as I get older? It is true that in this film not everything is handed on a plate to the viewer, however, for me, this is what makes it a complete breath of fresh air. I'm quite bored with having every intricate detail of stories and characters in modern films served up to me as if I was completely mindless. This film leaves the viewer to do some thinking for a change and as part of the process it challenges their perspectives and values. We are then left with questions not only of the film but also of ourselves, which is exactly where we are supposed to be. It is is original, thought provoking and takes us back to the old art of story telling at its best.

Adam