Charles in Hidden city

 This was a Stephen Poliakoff film broadcast on Channel 4 in 1988

In London, a journalist and a picture researcher uncover a secret from the past and discover hidden aspects of the city. For James Richards there are no surprises left; he is too much in control of his life. Sharon is a child of the video age who enters his life with a vengeance. Her all-consuming passion is to find the truth behind a mysterious piece of film she has found inserted into a government information reel. Through her he discovers that the London he thought he knew is in reality a mysterious and Hidden City.

 

 

 

 

 

LONDON — Hundreds of feet below the city streets in some abandoned tunnels that sheltered thousands during the World War II bombings, Charles Dance is making a new thriller, "Hidden City."
"It will," says first-time director Stephen Poliakoff, "show a London few people have ever seen before."
That it will. Forget about Big Ben, the Tower, Westminster Abbey. Welcome to the dank, dark world where so many Londoners spent their nights back in the '40s.

For that's where much of the story takes place as Dance, playing a writer, takes on the dangerous task of helping a young woman (Cassie Stuart) search for some classified government information stored in the underground tunnels.
"It's certainly a different look at London," said Dance, who, even at this level, cuts an imposing figure. "Here we are hundreds of feet below the people and the traffic. A lot of the beds are still here from the war. But, of course, it's no longer open to the public. I wanted to do this because it's Stephen's debut as a director and he wrote it (Poliakoff is best known here as a playwright; his "Breaking the Silence" was staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company) and I must say it's looking good.
"The only trouble is we have only a six-week shoot, which isn't nearly long enough. Film makers in this country work under such difficult circumstances. And that's a shame because we have such talented people."
("Hidden City," which has no distributor yet, is partly financed by Britain's Channel 4 television network.)

 

  

3.28 mn of it from youtube

  

                                                 

Charles on working with Poliakoff : 

I had the good fortune to work with Stephen Poliakoff on his first two films where he was both writer and director – Hidden City and Century.

I was and remain a huge fan of his work.  He seems to be able to seize upon seemingly obscure or ordinary incidents and characters and certainly places, around which he weaves the most compelling of storylines in a style that defies comparison with any other writer.
One of his earlier works for television Caught On A Train, starring Dame Peggy Ashcroft and Michael Kitchen, was set largely in the confines of a train carriage. It begins with the most uneventful and chance meeting of two unconnected characters and slowly develops into a nightmare scenario for one of them.  It was principally this film that made me want to work with him.  That and Breaking The Silence for The Royal Shakespeare Company. Again set on a train but based, I believe, on a period of his grandfather’s life in post revolutionary Russia.
His work for the cinema, television, and the theatre has a knack of drawing his audiences into the worlds he creates. I don’t think I’m alone in feeling that I need to sit forward in my seat rather than lounge back into it – lest I miss a small but ultimately telling detail that will  illuminate a character.
He has a deserved reputation for being one of the most original, enlightening and innovative playwrights of his generation.
http://www.almeida.co.uk/event/mycity/actors-on-stephen-Poliakoff