STEPHEN POLIAKOFF is talking movies. This is unusual because he hasn’t made a film in a decade. Now he returns to the big screen with Glorious 39 after a string of acclaimed TV dramas – including The Lost Prince and Shooting The Past – earned him the reputation as one of our foremost writers.

He’s been doing TV, he says, because his work has been on “what they call this dreadful phenomenon ‘high-end television’ – it was not as expensive as people assume, but was made to look like that with good cast and good production values”.

He reminds me that he made movies in the Nineties, including Close My Eyes with Clive Owen.

The main difference between small and big screen work is the number of voices wanting a say on a film because there are more producers and, in the case of Glorious 39, five different funding sources.

Poliakoff points out it didn’t involve a major studio or the US, reasons that kept him away from cinema projects. Because his TV work was successful, one led to another.

“With British films in the Nineties it was very difficult to get the right distribution unless you were working for a major studio, or it was picked up by one.

Then all the decisions are referred to the US. They’ll spend vast amounts of money advertising your film, but they’ll re-cut it,” he says.

He points to his cinema film Close My Eyes, which did good opening week business but which the major cinema chains still refused to book nationally. “You have a hit like that and still couldn’t beat the system. I was very disillusioned. But things have got better, it’s possible to get wider distribution now.”

GLORIOUS 39 is, by all accounts, a more personal drama than some previous work because the idea was triggered by the realisation that he could so easily not have been here.

“And none of my family would be here because I am Jewish. I realised we were within a whisker of things turning out very differently,” he says.

What triggered the story, set in the summer of 1939, was Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement in the years leading to the Second World War. Some wanted to avoid another war at any cost. The film tells how government spies set out to destablise and discredit the anti-appeasement movement at any cost.

“To me, that was really a mind-tingling realisation,” he says.

“Obviously, you think if the Nazis had won I wouldn’t be here,” he added.

“But to think most of the newspaper