What makes an audience watch something and care about the characters is the emotional life of the characters.
— Jed Mercurio
There's something very frightening about the vulnerability of mothers and babies.
With 'Cardiac Arrest,' I wanted to show that there were times when doctors really didn't care.
I believe that properly regulated research in stem-cell biotechnology will lead to many valuable improvements in medical treatment and that objections on religious or ethical grounds should be vigorously opposed.
Sci-fi gives you the scope to do grand stories.
Nowadays, you can't broadcast dodgy special effects and then put up a caption saying, 'Sorry, this is what the budget was.' You have to do it with high production values because the audience has been spoilt by the special effects on things like 'The X Files' and 'Independence Day.'
The world is a horrible place, but no one worries because we have all been pacified by anodyne television in which incorruptible cops solve crimes, crusading lawyers keep the innocent out of prison, and streetwise social workers rescue children from abuse.
The doctor part of me recognises the light and shade of medical life, but the writer in me is more attracted by the darkness, perhaps because it is the road less travelled.
It was a strange feeling, filming a night scene in Selly Oak High Street with a television crew and famous actors in tow, when twenty years ago, at that time of night, I would've been stumbling around in search of a kebab.
'Line of Duty' had originally been conceived as a returnable drama, with the premise being that the fictional anticorruption unit AC-12 would move on to a new case in each series, centred on a high-profile antagonist accused of corruption.
I do like books to be quite an intense experience, and that's the kind of novel I respond to as a reader.
I'm always thinking about my work, always thinking about where it's taking me.
Standards in public life have decayed over time... Incompetence is the norm.
It's important that the actor doesn't feel like they're working in a vacuum. If the actor is told, 'Oh, it's a secret; just play it this way or that way,' it's a bit patronising. I think you have to bring the actor into your thinking and explain things.
When a critic or journalist writes, 'It's too complex,' or, 'It's full of plot holes,' they very rarely take the step of identifying what they mean. The reason they do that is to protect themselves, because they don't want to reveal that they may have misunderstood or missed something.
I'm reading 'Ten Storey Love Song' by Richard Milward. I read his first novel, 'Apples,' after hearing a reading of his in the Hague. I really enjoyed it, so I've started this one.
If you're a drama writer, obviously you always have to tell the truth; there's no element of fiction in at all.
It doesn't excite me as a writer to write some swearing or sex scenes, because they don't have any emotional content.
British drama can compete with America creatively. But the two systems are very different.
'Cardiac Arrest' was the first British drama to use a lot of medical jargon. 'ER' began the following year and was the first American drama to do that.
In 'Bodies,' we had a lot of gore because it was a medical drama. The gore was authentic.
Certain people in politics and the press felt there was a political spin to 'Cardiac Arrest,' but there was no political agenda to what I was doing.
I think you've got to be careful with gore. Different genres need different things.
I think that the general public understands that its own doctors are human, fallible, and flawed.
The success of 'Bodyguard' is a tribute to the magnetism of our two leads, Richard Madden and Keeley Hawes.
In real constabularies, the relevant department that is the subject of 'Line of Duty' is called Professional Standards. However, 'Line of Duty' is set in a fictional anticorruption department, AC-12, in order to prevent any unintentional resemblance to actual units, cases, or individuals.
No one was more surprised than me by the success of the first series of 'Line of Duty.'
I try and relate my writing to something I know about, and I had a primary experience of being in a competitive, military environment and being part of a squadron.
The part of my life where my character was defined was at work because of the decisions I make and the things I do, and I guess that's what I feel qualifies me and attracts me to write the characters I do.
I didn't study writing or drama or anything like that... that was not really a viable route for me.
'Line Of Duty,' for dramatic purposes, tends to create characters whose corruption is balanced on certain ethical conflicts, whereas the majority of corruption in the real world is simply based on greed.
'Bodies' remains the drama I'm most proud of.
The footballer I've admired most in the last ten years is Zinedine Zidane... one of those rare individuals who had the skill but also incredible vision.
The advantage you get of something having been on the air for a while is people get to know the characters more, and they get to be more invested in the world.
'Lady Chatterley's Lover' is a novel that constitutes a milestone of English literature.
If you look at American medical fiction written by doctors, like 'The House of God' by Samuel Shem and 'The Blood of Strangers' by Frank Huyler, both have themes of cynicism and dysfunction running through them that you won't find in 'ER.' You find it in 'Scrubs,' but because that's a comedy, it gets away with it.
'Frankenstein' is a timeless classic. As science advances, it becomes more relevant, not less. Its fantasy moves closer to fact, its horrors closer to reality.
I would compare my 'Frankenstein' to Cronenberg's remake of 'The Fly.' The monster in the original Fifties version of 'The Fly' was a crude, anatomical combination of man and insect, whereas Cronenberg's version exploited knowledge of DNA to depict him as a transgenic chimera.
Special effects are becoming more and more affordable and looking more and more like the real thing.
In 'Bodies,' we had a lot of gore because other medical dramas at the time had these hospitals where even a drop of blood seemed to be too much, which is clearly not what it's like when you cut someone up.
Part of what motivated my writing was anger. I was angry that the daily misery of doctors, nurses, and patients was being trivialised into soap opera. We were made to feel bad because we were not perfect like our television counterparts. We were resentful that our patients did not get better as quickly as they did on telly - or at all.
'Line Of Duty' is first and foremost a thriller. But I hope it will also be seen as a revisionist commentary on 21st century policing.
I have a lot of respect for our police forces. They are generally honest and effective.
So with 'Ascent,' one of the things I wanted to do was not make it too remote from the reader, for it to be engaged with the human side and not just to be about the cold metal of planes and spacecraft.
I want to be one of those serious, moody writers.
There are some writers who don't write about people who do jobs. I'm not going to name them, but you watch one of their films, or you read one of their books, and you think, 'What job do they do?' They seem to have a nice house and a nice income. How have they got it?
One of the most significant threats to our national security was and is home-grown Islamist terrorism.
The problem with individual opinion is that it doesn't necessary correlate with what the mass audience is thinking.
It was an absolute pleasure working with Stephen Graham. I've admired his work for many years, and what he brings is that real sense of authenticity.
The things I discovered when writing 'Line of Duty' were the tools you have available to write a thriller.
