Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
'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.
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.
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.
I think that the audience is smart enough to know that just because a drama is relating to real-world parallels, it doesn't mean that its story is exactly that story.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In the modern workplace, sexism has adopted a more subtle persona; therefore, people can be accused of sexism where it's far harder to determine whether they're actually committing sexism or thinking in a sexist way.
I write what I call precinct drama, and I tend to write things set in the workplace. Having an institution which gives a workplace its distinctive identity is really important to creating something which feels different.
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.
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.
Part of me isn't that interested as a person and a viewer in people's personal lives. I'm much more interested in what people do in the workplace and what goals they set themselves. I guess that's why I write a lot of precinct drama.
'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 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.
The idea of a physical stigma is quite appealing. When I wrote the book of 'Bodies,' there was a lot of that in the book about how there are physical manifestations of psychological problems - I think it's described as 'Narrativizing The Body.'
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'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.
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.
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.
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 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.
There is an apparatus set up to protect politicians, but those within that apparatus will have their own political views. I've got mates who are police officers and mates who are in the military, and they often have a very different view to the policy they're asked to carry out.
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.
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.'
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.