Feast of Stephen left me empty

Friends and Crocodiles BBC1

Desperate Housewives C4

Hotel Babylon BBC1

Many thanks to those readers with long memories who kindly (gleefully?) alerted me to the presence of the new BBC1 drama written and directed by Stephen Poliakoff, in the hope, presumably, that, as of yore, I may be tempted to dip my cursor into the metaphorical inkwell of vitriol-tinted Quink.

But although I'm happy to admit I don't get on with (OK, I loathe) most of Poliakoff's bloated oeuvre (but quite enjoyed The Lost Prince) this isn't just a weird OCD disguised as a hobby (unlike, say, the one involving the jelly babies and the gimp mask). In fact I approach each fresh new 'Preposteroff' meisterwerk thinking, 'Go on then, Steve, prove me wrong!'. It's just that he rarely does.

Loathing Poliakoff in a Poliakoff-loving world is a TV critic's version of the problem facing Professor Richard 'Spock' Dawkins, as exemplified by his C4 two-parter The Root of All Evil?, which ended last week and essentially boiled down to: it's OK for people to subscribe to archaic and illogical belief systems as long as they are also big enough to acknowledge that it's basically all balderdash (Christianity, Judaism ...) and piffle (Islam, everything else). Of course, I agree with Dawkins, even as I glance at my favourite Christmas gift - a small, plastic, glows-in-the-dark figure of St Clare (the Patron Saint of Television, bless her) which stands next to my laptop, beaming beatifically, a bit like a Bratz doll. Just in case.

Anyway, Friends and Crocodiles was, like almost everything by Poliakoff, a handsome but overlong emotional vacuum patrolled by excellent, if clearly bedazzled, actors (in this case, Damian Lewis, Jodhi May and Robert Lindsay) mouthing Poli's platitudes as if their CV's depended on it. There were all the usual 'themes' - Class (ideally with a Bridesheadian amount of indolent and sun-dappled poshness), Money, Family, Friends and The Past, not to mention an overdose of hard visual metaphors interspersed with pointlessly indulgent prettiness.

Plot? Not really - the World of Poliakoff is a place where anything as obvious and vulgar as a story fuelled by compelling dialogue is disdained in favour of, well, nothing much, but very beautifully and expensively acted and shot.

At the beginning of Friends and Crocodiles we met Paul Reynolds (Damian Lewis, affecting an estuarial drawl), a Gatsbyesque (we knew this because one of the characters describe him thus) young property tycoon living a life of rock'n'roll-style loucheness in an off-the-peg stately pile, surrounded by friends, lovers, hangers-on and a baby crocodile (a metaphor, it later transpired, for survival against the evolutionary odds).

The fact that Paul didn't seem to ever bother working made his achievements all the more baffling, particularly as this was meant to be the front of the Eighties, a time when I recall the country was still wreathed in economic mire. But let us not get bogged down by such piffling distractions.

Anyway, into Reynolds's charmed, if charmless, life walked (quite literally - she strode across his land on the way to work) Jodhi May as lovely, feisty estate agent, Lizzie. Paul duly persuaded her to become his PA, a job which mostly involved organising the sort of posh 'picnics' in which guests sat ranged along one side of a lengthy table, Last Supper-style, with their backs to Paul's house and lake, all the better for Poliakoff to shoot a pretty picture, even if it also served to make the scene appear absurdly stagey.

This is one of my many problems with Poliakoff - whenever I think I might be able to surrender myself to his Vision Thing, up pops a moment of such awesome self-consciousness that I'm back to square one, forever aware of watching rather than being swept away by the dramatic dynamic of the moment.

Over the next couple of decades, as the film sought to explore the oddly intense but unconsummated and thereby unsatisfying relationship between Paul (initially a fan of threesomes, eventually evolving into a free-range Babyfather) and Lizzie (duly married off to somebody forgettable - mostly, one suspects, for the sake of a big flashy wedding showdown scene, worthy of a soap), Friends and Crocodiles was full of irritatingly distracting moments.

Eventually Paul's professional star fell, while Lizzie, by now a venture capitalist, rose through the business ranks to sit on the board of a lumbering corporation during the dotcom boom. At this point she invested in the internet when, if she'd taken Paul's late-Eighties advice, she could have been living off the fat of a chain of bookstores not unlike Waterstones, or some vacuum cleaners not unlike Dysons. Unintentionally comic, this hijacking of real-life businesses for dramatic effect perpetually dragged the viewer away from the real action. Or would have done if there had been much action to be dragged away from.

In the end, without apparently learning anything other than the fact that they might have been better off as business partners all along, the final scene of this anaemic 'love story' saw Paul and Lizzie hanging out (though not, sadly, 'hooking-up' in the contemporary sense) at another big party at Paul's new house. But as they didn't even declare their undying love for each other or indulge in a gratuitous snog or even admit to a mutual crocodile-fetish, what was the point of it all?

I really don't think I missed anything. In fact I know I didn't. If you were looking for a searing indictment of Eighties mores then you'd be better off waiting for the forthcoming adaptation of Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty, which should at least raise some interesting questions (about politics, sex, and sexual politics) of the sort that Poliakoff sidesteps in favour of ... well, nothing much, but always very beautifully and expensively acted and shot.

There are, admittedly, a few of us out here who believe that the path to Poliaville is made of yellow brick and detours, en route to Oz, via the BBC, wherein a shallow empty drama has a chance to pass itself off as something profound and meaningful. I guess that commissioning Poliakoff makes BBC types feel they are indulging in some proper grown-up post-Potter (Dennis, not Harry, obviously) telly, and they haven't noticed he's really the Emperor, sans pants, best enjoyed by the suggestible. (That devil Derren Brown probably has a word for this kind of dramatic conjuring trick). Nonetheless, in order to keep pulling off the same stunt - which he does often, with A-list actors loving every flattering minute and Baftas at the end of it all - Poliakoff must be very nearly as clever as he is pompous, pretentious, portentous and humourless. Though I'm sure he's an absolute scream at dinner parties.

But, happily, last week wasn't all style and no substance, because Desperate Housewives returned to our screens. What's that? You say the Wives are just a teensy bit on the stylish-yet-shallow side? Come now! Just because they starve to within a quarter-inch of a size 6, remain perfectly groomed even while being held at gunpoint or committing a little light suburban murder and have almost certainly never read an Alan Hollinghurst novel in their entire fluffy self-absorbed lives doesn't mean they aren't infinitely more representative of contemporary womanhood than any feeble feminine cipher dreamed up by a Poliakoff.

Frankly, most women have more in common with Bree van de Kamp than they'd care to admit. For unlike Poliakoff's Lizzie, bright and steely Bree would have seduced fellow redhead Damian Lewis before breakfast, before tidying his box files and Cillit Bang-ing his work surfaces like a woman possessed.

I love Bree. I want her hair products, her cashmere, her icy self-control and her breasts (though not necessarily in that order). And that scene in which she swapped her late husband's prep school tie for Tom Scavo's muted blue stripes in front of the funeral congregation showed that, as ever, she is a woman with her priorities in absolutely the right place. Hell, even Richard Dawkins recognises that a man will rot in hell for all eternity if buried in an orange tie.

Meanwhile - and issuing from within the same shiny BBC department as Hustle and Spooks (The Striding Purposefully Towards the Camera as Though We're Really In The West Wing Department: a hotbed of glamorously louche Caiparinha-swilling hedonism of the sort Poliakoff could only dream of dramatising) - BBC1 gave us Tamzin Outhwaite and Max Beesley striding purposefully through the lobby of the Hotel Babylon, a show which does for five star metropolitan B&Bs pretty much what Footballers' Wives did for swimming pools, extramarital liaisons and suburban bling.

And while that may not sound like much of a compliment, those readers who are not necessarily devoted Poliakoff fans will recognise it as a love letter straight from my classy little heart.

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