I Confess: Stephen Poliakoff's Life of Crime

'I have an addiction to the Edgar Lustgarten real-crime B movies that always turn up at two or three in the morning on Channel 4.

'Lustgarten's such a strange figure, a contradiction: a schoolmaster, but a ghoulish, voyeuristic schoolmaster. He has the trappings of authority - he'll deliver his story from behind a desk, before moving to a chair or standing next to a filing cabinet - yet he's slightly pornographic. He lingers on the nasty details. He usually begins with something like, 'We start in a day in January when a missing head was found.' A piece of absent anatomy invariably features.

'I still remember one extraordinary case about cut off hands and a hotel in Bayswater where the guests were disappearing. Two or three had been carved up in the kitchens. Very brutal, very macabre and done very matter of factly. Almost cosy - very British.

Stephen Poliakoff's film 'Century' is released on New Year's Eve. He was in the confessional with John Lyttle

(Photograph omitted)