Prince John

The answer, as we now know, is that Poliakoff - a name to conjure with in the world of TV drama with a string of awards behind him - was drawn to Prince John for two reasons. First was that indefinable spark of life in the boy himself which has lingered through the more than eight decades that have passed since his death. We may know very little about Prince John, but start digging through the hints, the glimpses, the scraps of memory, and it becomes apparent that to most of those who did know him, he was special. 'George's children are very nice…. [this is the Dowager Empress of Russia, writing to her son, the Tsar, in the spring of 1909, when John was three.] The little ones, George and Johnny are both charming and very amusing…'1 'Johnny… was very quaint [this is Princess Alice of Athlone, John's aunt] and one evening when Uncle George returned from stalking he bent over Aunt May and kissed her, and they heard Johnny soliloquize, "She kissed Papa, ugly old man".'2 Prince John said things, perceptive, funny or imaginative, that people remembered long after. He related to the world, it seems, in his own, slightly quirky way. He stares back at us from old photographs, sometimes bemused or questioning, but often - and there are a lot of photographs of Prince John - he looks cheeky, amused, and full of life. Despite all the negative comments and labels that have been heaped on him down the years, these things remain. For Stephen Poliakoff, whose previous projects have involved research into the subject of children with disabilities or learning difficulties, the subject was a natural, though he professes fierce resistance to the idea of writing about the royal family - 'such a surreal and unnatural institution.'3

But there was another thread to his interest, and it is this that gives the drama its edge and fills over three hours of transmission time. Poliakoff's imagination was captured by the fact that John's short life spanned a dramatic period of history. Born into the opulent Edwardian summer, when a closely inter-related network of Kings and Princes ruled over almost every corner of Europe and seemed set to do so for ever, John's illness took hold as that world spun down into chaos. He died almost precisely as it ended. As a King's son, too he was part of that order - who knows what he might have seen? So, in dramatising the Prince's life, Poliakoff was also dramatising an important period of history seen through a child's eyes, 'For', he writes in his introduction to the screenplay of The Lost Prince, 'if we were to achieve that perennial fantasy of time travel and propel ourselves backwards into any time but our own, we would almost certainly find ourselves staring at it with the same mixture of cool detachment and deep curiosity that children naturally possess.'4 This aspect of the drama was beautifully handled, with events glimpsed through open doors and snatches of conversation - often very telling conversation - drifting into hearing from unseen mouths far above, as the camera moved through the scene on the eye-level of a child.