Quotes from Jed Mercurio

I do like books to be quite an intense experience, and that's the kind of novel I respond to as a reader.

There's something very frightening about the vulnerability of mothers and babies.

One of the things I learned on medical drama 'Bodies' was that actors can't play ambiguity.

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.

Between the ages of 12 and 15, I wanted to be a pilot because I thought it would be glamorous and dangerous.

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 come from gender-balanced workplaces. I started off working in medicine, and when I went through med school, it's 50/50 men and women. And when I started working as a doctor, it's 50/50 men and women. So I've always been very accustomed to women occupying pivotal roles in the professional environment.

You can have characters that say one thing and do another, and in certain kinds of drama, you can't get away with that because the audience will become confused - or certainly, the commissioners will become confused and tell you to stop doing it!

It doesn't excite me as a writer to write some swearing or sex scenes, because they don't have any emotional content.

Yefgenii said, "The Americans spent millions of dollars designing a pen that would work in space. What did we do?" Gevorkian's head was down, his eyes were down. "What did we do?" Gevorkian lifted his head "We used pencils." "We used pencils.

Some shows do nosedive at the end, or some piece of content could become incredibly controversial and affect the way the show is seen.

British drama can compete with America creatively. But the two systems are very different.

I don't normally think of a specific actor. I concentrate on the character, and then when we get into pre-production, that's how names come up.

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.

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 like to sit at my desk... sometimes I get inspiration when I'm going about my normal day-to-day life.

I like the differences between American and British television dramas.

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.

'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.

We earned the 'Line of Duty' audience's loyalty over a number of years, and I feel privileged to have that.

If we have friends over for dinner, I do the cooking. I like the pressure of a big meal and the technical challenges of a roast.

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.

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.

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.