Line Of Duty’s Jed Mercurio reveals how he keeps MILLIONS hooked ahead of the show’s season 5 finale
HE is the former RAF officer and hospital doctor turned star writer.
And after creating cop thriller Line Of Duty, he now has the entire nation on tenterhooks ahead of tonight’s finale.
Jed Mercurio’s gritty upbringing, military-inspired attention for detail and experience of high-pressure life-and-death situations have fired him to pen the nail-biting series.
To safeguard the show’s secrets, which have a record 14million viewers locked in suspense, Jed, 53, even writes episodes one at a time. He also keeps twists from his loved-ones and openly admits LYING to protect the plotlines.
He has admitted: “I’ve lied before and it may well be I will lie again.
“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.”
Dad-of-two Jed even keeps his family in the dark about twists in the AC-12 department and the identity of the mysterious “H”.
He said of previous shows: “I wouldn’t want to rob friends and family of the opportunity to be shocked and surprised by the twists and turns of the story.”
He added: “For something like Line Of Duty to work, it has to be both plausible and unexpected.
“Yet those two things are clearly inversely proportional in that the more plausible something is, the more expected it is. You have to find the balance.”
Anticipation for tonight’s explosive 90-minute series finale is at fever-pitch. The heart-racing cop drama, starring Vicky McClure, 35, Adrian Dunbar, 60, and Martin Compston, 34, is expected to beat the record 17million viewers who tuned in for the final episode of Jed’s other BBC1 sensation, Bodyguard, last year.
‘NASA WOULD SEND ME MISSION REPORTS’
Today the Sun on Sunday gets inside the brain of the man responsible for the show — telling how he painstakingly pens each episode, takes inspiration from a cop who was a childhood pal, and how he used his medical skills to save someone’s life on a TV film set.
Jed, the son of Italian immigrants, grew up in Cannock, Staffs. His dad worked as a miner and his mother was a machinist.
Speaking about his hometown, he once said: “I’m stopping short of saying it’s a s***hole.
“But when you spend time away, you start to appreciate things a lot more. 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. You might need to avoid the young kid throwing up in the river, but it is a good place.”
As a teenager he wanted to be an astronaut and “used to write to Nasa” to get mission reports sent to him — something he attributes to giving him an eye for detail.
He said: “Nasa would send me batches of photos and mission reports from their Apollo, Gemini and Mercury missions. I also read widely on the subject of manned space travel.”
Watching TV shows he loved as a kid — such as Star Trek — shaped his drive to write dramas where no character was “safe”.
Jed said: “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.”
Eventually, he trained to be a doctor at the University of Birmingham and obtained a flying badge with the RAF, becoming an officer.
He said: “If things had gone well and I had become a medical officer pilot in the RAF, I certainly wouldn’t be writing now.”
But instead he began working as a physician at hospitals in the West Midlands, working 65-hour weeks.
While he was there he answered an advert in the British Medical Journal looking for a TV scriptwriter for a new hospital drama. He used his gritty experiences of hospital and military life to write Nineties BBC drama Cardiac Arrest, under the pseudonym John MacUre.
It was this no-nonsense writing about what really happened in hospitals that laid the grounding for the earthiness of Line Of Duty.
Fan theories on H
By Ben Griffiths
LINE Of Duty fans are full of speculation on who the mysterious “H” might be.
At the end of the last episode, Supt Ted Hastings, played by Adrian Dunbar, was arrested and charged as the suspected bent copper hunted by AC-12.
But Twitter users were not too sure and had wild thoughts on the real outcome.
Fan Elliot Tyler thought the real culprit was someone living in flat H in Kate’s apartment block and that Vicky McClure’s character was liasing with them.
Calleymav believed “H” would be revealed as Roz Huntley, Thandie Newton’s character from the last series.
CathyHiley suspected Gill Bigelow: “Hilton was H. Gill was having a fling with him because she likes powerful men. She somehow took over where he left off & wants revenge on Ted for rejecting her.”
Siobhan Mackenzie pointed to Ted’s wife Roisin, writing: “Never liked her for the way she treated our Ted.”
He explained: “If doctors work all day and all night, they get tired, and, if they carry out procedures they aren’t trained for, they make mistakes.
“I want the layman to appreciate that doctors aren’t saintly beings able to function without rest, food, or emotional support; that they’re fallible, and so sometimes they fail.
“I believe that attributing flaws to medical characters makes them not just doctors but something more.
“It makes them people. I’m quite fortunate as a writer in that I have experience of public institutions. I brought that experience to writing about the police.”
His medical training helped save the life of a young man on the set of Cardiac Arrest, after a prank went wrong when the cast played around with a defibrillator. The man’s heart stopped but Jed gave him compressions and brought him back to life. He took a year out from medicine in 1994 and never returned to it as his writing career took off. Jed continued to write dramas about the profession, including 2004 BBC show Bodies and 2015’s Sky1 series Critical.
Shortly afterwards he met his wife, the producer Elaine Cameron. Their first date was like something from one of his scripts.
She thought she was meeting him to discuss work, he thought it was their first date. The pair now live in London with their two children.
‘I AM JUST DOING WHAT FEELS RIGHT FOR ME’
Around ten years ago, he started work on what would become Line Of Duty. Jed said: “I wanted to do a cop show that was different in terms of regular cops chasing down criminals.
“So I had the idea of an anti- corruption unit, basically cops versus cops and that became the central concept of the series.”
The first series in 2012 showed Jed’s eye for detail and authenticity, from the bleak, anonymous offices to the in-house police acronyms such as OCG (Organised Crime Gang) and UCO (Undercover officer). In one interview, Jed said: “I write precinct dramas where it’s not about what goes on in the home so much as what goes on in some kind of institution. I write about very work-orientated people. Because I am.”
Adrian Dunbar — aloof AC-12 chief Ted Hastings — said the show has been lauded by serving officers because of “how procedural it is”.
And this is down to the close band of ex-detectives Jed employs as advisers.
He said: “After series one I was contacted by an old school mate who I hadn’t seen since we were 16. He told me he was a police inspector, liked the show and eventually he became our adviser.”
Jed, whose show has been commissioned for a sixth series, also asks the cast for input.
He said: “When I’m writing I am just doing what feels right for me. I have kind of learned that you are mad to save things.
“If that first episode does not feel jam-packed by episode two it is too late. I write it down as an outline.
“An outline for an episode of Line Of Duty is typically between five and ten pages. We do it episode by episode. I have to have some idea of what’s going to happen but what I try to avoid with Line Of Duty is getting too attached to something further down the line.
“The problem with that is you can sometimes end up treading water for something that’s going to happen in episode four.
“So with Line Of Duty it’s a bit more of a high-wire act.”
He has become renowned for red herrings and teasing audiences. And he has given several Line Of Duty characters names beginning with “H” or with an association to “H”, the name of the elusive corrupt senior police officer.
Jed, who also revealed he intentionally steered clear of setting the show in a “real British city” to avoid offending detectives, added: “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.
“While it may be true that people don’t want Hastings to be bent, if we do lead him down the road of corruption, I think the audience will stick with us.”
Line Of Duty is now enjoyed around the world and is the UK’s most-watched show of 2019. It has enhanced the careers of leading actors such as Stephen Graham, 45, Daniel Mays, 41, and Keeley Hawes, 43, who also worked with Jed on his 2018 hit Bodyguard.
Speaking about Bodyguard, which also starred Richard Madden, 32, Jed said: “People were saying that they couldn’t breathe.
“They’re used to watching TV where they get up and go get themselves a drink, or they pause it and make a phone call.
“People were saying they were rooted to the show, which was incredibly flattering.”
One thing is for sure, no one will be getting up to make a cup of tea during tonight’s Line Of Duty either.