Steven Knight - polymath

Steven Knight tells Lyn Gardener in The Guardian how he manages to create gameshows (Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?) and write novels (The Movie House) plays (The President Of An Empty Room) and screenplays (Dirty Pretty Things).

"There's nothing I can do about it," he says. "If an idea for a game show comes up, it comes up. It's all writing, just with a different emphasis. I see everything I do as being quite unified.

To get a game show into production is as challenging and as intellectually demanding as it is to write a novel or screenplay. Getting Millionaire right was as hard as writing Dirty Pretty Things. Harder. In the pilots, contestants kept wanting to take the money; we had to find ways - the lifelines - of keeping them in the seat, answering the questions. But there is so much snobbery about popular culture. A game show just isn't valued as much as a novel."