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.
Jed Mercurio
As a teenager, I read a lot of science-fiction, but then I read 'Catch-22' and 'The Catcher in the Rye' and started reading more literary fiction.
'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.
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.
No one was more surprised than me by the success of the first series of 'Line of Duty.'
There's something very frightening about the vulnerability of mothers and babies.
Standards in public life have decayed over time... Incompetence is the norm.
I like the differences between American and British television dramas.
The success of 'Bodyguard' is a tribute to the magnetism of our two leads, Richard Madden and Keeley Hawes.
When 'Line of Duty' started on BBC2, there was a feeling that it couldn't ever become a big show because the BBC2 drama budget is much smaller, and a returning cop series would take away from the Stephen Poliakoff/David Hare stuff that they love to commission.
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.
British drama can compete with America creatively. But the two systems are very different.
I have a lot of respect for our police forces. They are generally honest and effective.
I think once you do the unexpected, and you take the viewers to a position of discomfort about being able to rely on characters surviving, then it does completely affect the way in which the drama is viewed.
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.
The things I discovered when writing 'Line of Duty' were the tools you have available to write a thriller.
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.
Cannock is a friendly place. You can stroll down the road to a decent pub and have a good curry, and it is not too faceless.
I remember watching TV as a kid, and whenever there was some sort of jeopardy involving the hero, I could reassure myself that they were what I'd call a 'can't-die' character, so everything would be OK.
I believe that attributing flaws to medical characters makes them not just doctors but something more. It makes them people.
I've never reached the point where I was ready to abandon a series.
'Bodies' remains the drama I'm most proud of.
I think it's hugely important to have a strong episode one; you can lose an audience so quickly now. You can't afford to take the attitude that you will use the first one as an introduction and save the high drama for later.
Between the ages of 12 and 15, I wanted to be a pilot because I thought it would be glamorous and dangerous.
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.
I think that the general public understands that its own doctors are human, fallible, and flawed.
With 'Cardiac Arrest,' I wanted to show that there were times when doctors really didn't care.
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.
'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.
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?
I didn't study writing or drama or anything like that... that was not really a viable route for me.
People don't always understand the way it works with casting. TV projects tend to be commissioned to screen at a particular time of year, so your shooting dates are chosen to meet that. And then the casting is a matter of choosing from the actors who are available for those dates.
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.
'Line of Duty' is a social realist drama, so it's set in a world that has the recognisable features of the authentic world we see around us.
One of the things I learned on medical drama 'Bodies' was that actors can't play ambiguity.
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.
There's a classic medical aphorism: 'Listen to the patient; they're telling you the diagnosis.' Actually, a lot of patients are just telling you a lot of rubbish, and you have to stop them and ask the pertinent questions. But, yes, in both drama and medicine, isolated facts can accumulate to create the narrative.
For something like 'Line of Duty' to work, it has to be both plausible and unexpected.
One of the most significant threats to our national security was and is home-grown Islamist terrorism.
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.'
Sci-fi gives you the scope to do grand stories.
As a content creator, all you can do is do your best work and then hope that it resonates somehow with an audience.
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.
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.
People are used to watching cop shows in which the cops are very straight down the line and they solve the crimes, but I think people actually have a much more sophisticated and varied view of the police.
I love writing thrillers.
I am a social realist writer.
There aren't a lot of political dramas on TV, and those that are tend to be American.
We earned the 'Line of Duty' audience's loyalty over a number of years, and I feel privileged to have that.
It's always useful to know that people are emotionally invested in a series because it means that you can take them down a certain road, and they should be interested.
