Quotes from Jed Mercurio

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?

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 love to do things that kind of mess with the movie formula that you can always find the right place to park; you've always got a phone signal. And I think audiences really respond to the limitations of real life when they intrude on drama.

I think a lot of police procedurals are very conventional. With the stuff I'm doing, I'm trying to approach the institution of the police in a different way.

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.

'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.

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.

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.

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 tell the truth where it's the ethical thing to do, but in terms of entertainment, there's a certain fun and enjoyment that can be added to the experience by a few judicious lies.

As a content creator, all you can do is do your best work and then hope that it resonates somehow with an audience.

'Lady Chatterley's Lover' is a novel that constitutes a milestone of English literature.

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.

There are great female role models out there, and I just feel very proud to be able to represent them in my work.

I want to be one of those serious, moody writers.

Special effects are becoming more and more affordable and looking more and more like the real thing.

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.

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.'

I think that the general public understands that its own doctors are human, fallible, and flawed.

For something like 'Line of Duty' to work, it has to be both plausible and unexpected.

In my third year at medical school in Birmingham, I joined the Air Force as a medical cadet so that I was sponsored to become a doctor.

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.

Standards in public life have decayed over time... Incompetence is the norm.