AS A YOUNG ambitious writer not long out of Cambridge University, Stephen Davis was summoned to Hollywood by actress Jane Fonda to write a movie.

Since then he has made a good living out of supplying drama for both the silver screen and television and when he is not tucked away in his quiet Rodborough home he can be found rubbing shoulders with some of the glitziest of stars of stage and screen.

So why is this talented scriptwriter becoming increasingly frustrated with the British film industry?

Sue Smith went along to find out.

"THE phone has been going all day," said Stephen Davis as he prepared fresh bagels for lunch in the big airy kitchen of his Rodborough home.

The BBC are in production with the new series of Waking the Dead starring Trevor Eve which Stephen started writing in 2001 during its second series and he has been frantically busy.

"We got the ratings up and positioned the show at the top of the tree for popular drama," said Stephen.

"The challenge is to meet the present demand for strong ratings and to keep the scripts intelligent so the discriminating audience isn't alienated, the way it is being generally from contemporary television."

After graduating from Cambridge University in 1972 Stephen was taken on as a development executive with Granada Television.

"I worked on Brideshead Revisited as my first job.

In those days ITV set out to emulate the BBC and show it could do quality drama. Now things are rather the other way about," he said.

In 1977 he was offered the Yorkshire Television Fellowship in Television Drama at Sheffield University.

At the end of the year the university gave him a Master of Philosophy degree. "I think I'm the oldest media studies graduate in the UK," he said.

Shortly after his second BBC television play, "Contacts", one of the first dramas to be written about the Vietnam war, he was summoned to Hollywood by Jane Fonda.

"I've always been attracted to controversial subjects, the ones the broadcasters think are taboo but which prove to be the strong stories that audiences want to see."

The Jane Fonda project, about a political assassination in Washington, remains unmade and after six months "rattling around in a vast borrowed house in the Hollywood hills where Oscars were used as doorsteps," Stephen came home to resume his career in British television.

A string of plays and a serial, "Degrees of Error" followed, including the first BBC film co-produced with the now dominant HBO cable channel - Nosenko.

"The film starred Tommy Lee Jones," said Stephen.

"I went to stay on his Texas ranch and discovered I was the only person for a thousand miles around who couldn't ride a horse."

When he came home, Stephen took lessons. "I like to ride when I'm back in California. They have a coyote hunt in Malibu. They all wear pink coats and blow horns."

But the days when the Brits led the world in television came to a grinding halt in the 1990s.

"We forget that television was the Internet of the 1960s," said Stephen.

"It was the medium that offered access across the social spectrum. It was seen as an educational, civilising force.

"I grew up admiring great television dramatists and they kindled my interest in drama and literature generally. That's when I knew that I wanted to be a writer."

Stephen is cautiously optimistic about signs of a revival in great British televison drama.

He has recently had another of his controversial subjects commissioned by the BBC, a film set in Northern Ireland, where he spent two years at the end of the 1990s living in the Republican ghettos trying to understand the origin of the Troubles for a Channel 4 series - cancelled when Michael Grade abruptly left the channel.

"My career has taken me to some very interesting and sometimes dangerous places.

I think of drama as an opportunity to bring people fresh perspectives on the world and that means sharing one's discoveries.

I don't enjoy drama that preaches, least of all when it preaches to the converted."

But what about the scripts that go unmade, like the Jane Fonda project?

"The path to production can be incredibly long and exhausting," said Stephen.

It took him five years to get Ruby, his movie about the assassination of John Kennedy made.

It was released in 1992 and has since become a cult film.

"Ruby was adapted from my own stage play - a long time before Oliver Stone thought up JFK," said Stephen.

"Sometimes it can be a dispiriting journey from idea to execution. But you keep going," he said.

Stephen has written nine British movies which have yet to be produced. "We barely have a film industry," he said. "And if we do, it's definitely a cottage industry."

Stephen, 53, is married to Jane and they have two daughters, Zoe, 16, and Natalie, 13.

At one point he said he thought of moving out to Hollywood permanently.

"I enjoy Los Angeles and I don't find it a cultural wasteland at all. I find it lively and interesting.

"The days when Britain was some sort of cultural oasis are over now, and in a global culture, home is where your work is."

Home is an important place, wherever it is. Stephen regards the Stroud valleys the same way he regards British television - a once unique cultural asset, which has been battered and neglected but which is showing stirring signs of revival.

"I feel as strongly about conserving our ancient buildings and landscape as I do about our artistic heritage.

"I can hardly believe the philistinism that has led to their neglect and the economic ignorance that comes with it.

"The Stroud valleys have their listed buildings and historic landscape - that is what brings inward investment and tourism and brings people to live here.

"The British have the English language, which could have given them a key position in the massive global entertainment industry - an industry in which Hollywood, now dominant, is one of the USAs largest export earners."

Stephen has involved himself in conservation projects since arriving in Stroud in 1987 from London.

Now Chairman of The Woodchester Mansion Trust, he has secured Royal Patronage from The Prince of Wales, and is developing a long-term plan to see the Mansion expand its role as a conservation skills education centre.

He has also served for many years on the Stroud Preservation Trust.

He became involved after helping friends in Nailsworth save The George Hotel.

"Look at how the rescue of The George site from a modernist block development has benefited the town. Hill Paul will lead the way for Stroud in its turn," he said.

"The arts are worth fighting for," said Stephen. The BBC and television itself belongs to all of us. Theatre and literature are our heritage. There is not just room for the arts, there is a need for the arts.

The arts cannot be market-led without impoverishing all of us.

Hundreds of thousands of people marched for fox-hunting, but they didn't march for the arts. The next time we look up from our own back yards, we may find it's our cultural heritage that's decayed beyond repair."

Meanwhile, the phone is ringing and the production is waiting.

"Someone once said there's no such thing as writing," said Stephen

"Only rewriting."