A recent ebay purchase, a boxed set of six of Stephen Poliakoff's TV series for the BBC, has been one of the most pleasant surprises I've had in quite some time.

The box, which contains six series or one-off plays, runs from  the 1980 one-off  "Caught on a Train" through to 2006's Gideon's Daughter.  

I've completly failed to watch the shows in order, instead starting with the most recent and working my way backwards through the rest.

Last night I watched the third and final episode of "Shooting the Past", from 1999.  Winner of Best Drama Series in the Royal Television Awards of the same year, it is particularly interesting to comic readers because of one of the central conceits that is an important part of the drama.  Namely, the power of still images, in this case photographs, to capture a truth beyond words and moving pictures.

In that aim, it is incredibly successful.  In each episode the story of a life is told.  Told through a series of photographs placed in front of the viwer as Lindsay Duncan's character provides a narration in her calm, rich voice.  So fascinating and moving are some of these scenes, that they threaten to overshadow the rest of the film.

The plot, as in much of Poliakoff's drama seems to be secondary to the character interaction and development, concerns an anachronistic british photographic library facing closure and possible destruction when their home is purchased to make way for an american business school.

Lindsay Duncan is the cool, calm head of the library, while Timothy Spall plays an eccentric savant, capable of finding almost anything in the 10 million image collection and, more importantly, finding connections between seemingly unrelated sets of photographs.

Spall and Duncan dominate the piece from a performance perspective, but it was those storytelling sessions, most especially the story of a young jewish girl lost in Nazi-era Berlin, which were the most memorable parts of the episodes.  Even the cut sequences, where images are shown, almost randomly it seems, are enthralling.   

Not the best of his work.  Too uneven and the plotline for the final episode irritated me a little.  But there are those few minutes in each episode where voice and image and music all come together to make something very special.