Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Writer, producer and director best known for the TV drama Line of Duty.
On the island
Eight records
Death in Vegas featuring Liam Gallagher
This is something that I listened to a lot when it first came out during the production of Bodies which we filmed up in Leeds and it's something which I often find myself choosing to listen to when I'm on the flight to Belfast where we shoot Line of Duty and I associate it with staring out of the window of the aircraft at the lock and seeing the Harland and Wolf cranes come in.
This is a song that's meant different things to me over the years. Originally it was a song about being on the outside, being on the distant point of a triangle. And then twenty years ago this summer it was about one of those triangles concluding in my favour and I ended up with the woman who's now my wife, Elaine. And then very recently the two of us watched our daughter Molly, who's seventeen, do an absolutely brilliant cover version of this with her band.
This is the first song I recall being a favourite, and it reminds me of my childhood, of school, of home.
This is a band that reminds me so much of my time in medicine. And this is a song whose lyrics sometimes reminds me of what it was like to be a houseman. With the lights out, this is dangerous. I feel stupid and contagious.
I really enjoyed my time as a as a doctor, but uh I became very interested in the dark side of it in terms of my writing. And this is a song that I listened to a lot when I was writing Cardiac Arrest, when I was pouring those feelings into that work.
Nine While NineFavourite
When I went to university, um my horizons widened enormously and so did my musical horizons and um I discovered that I really was into music that had some kind of dark energy and this is a band that I still listen to, usually on my own, but it's still a first choice for me when I find myself in moments of solitude.
The All-Seeing Eye featuring Philip Oakey
This is a song which I think is a brilliant metaphor for the unexpected journey of a working class person. And I remember listening to this song when I was living in our first place together with Elaine and we were expecting our daughter Molly.
Generally when I listen to music I listen to it when I'm on my own. But in 1990 I went up to Leeds University to see the Sisters of Mercy. This is the standout song of that night and it was just something that I remember as being hundreds of people in a room all feeling the same things and seeing life in the same way.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:14How much is that ultimate control central to your creative vision of what you want to make on screen?
Well, I don't take it as being control, more as a position of influence. And when I first took on that role in the early two thousands, I really wanted to be the final common pathway of any discussion about the creative content of the programme. And that's a role that I've continued in with my original programming. And it's purely that I had experiences when I first started writing where I was marginalized or ignored. And it wasn't that I necessarily felt it was a blow to my ego. It was just that creative decisions were made about the programme that I could have had a significant input into. Just things that were purely about accuracy or what align meant or how a person would carry out a particular task. And now that I've got a lot of experience in that, I'm involved in all those bigger conversations about who directs it and who stars in it and how we cut the thing together and how we shoot it and what scenes stay in the final edit and which scenes we cut out.
Presenter asks
3:33You've written very diverse work. What are you proudest of so far?
Line of duty and bodies, and to a certain extent, cardiac arrest. Also, the novels I've written. Those were all things that I felt I was telling the story and drawing the characters in the way that I wanted to. If they don't meet with success, then that's a different thing. But one of the things that's very frustrating in the job I do is if you go through a process where your work is modified or changed and then it's not successful, afterwards you you end up kicking yourself and feeling that perhaps you've been kind of led up the garden path a little bit.
The keepsakes
The book
Roger Penrose
which is a very dense and very long book about physics and you need to actually be able to go away and work through some of the maths to develop the correct understanding. So I can see myself on the beach with a stick writing equations in the sand, trying to figure out the topology of normal space.
The luxury
Well, the idea of going to an island where you're meant to survive and not taking something of utility is kind of anathema to me. So if I was forced to take something that was a luxury, I would take a telescope so that I would have something to look forward to in those long evenings where I hope there's very little light pollution.
Presenter asks
5:35How much cooperation did you have in creation with real police officers working in real police forces?
Initially we got very little actually and we we certainly formed the view that uh police cooperation was PR led. Um I don't take the view obviously that police officers should stop investigating crimes and contribute to television fiction, but other programmes set in the police force were getting cooperation and we felt rather singled out that we weren't. And the the first episode featured a police counterterrorism operation in which an innocent man was accidentally shot. And the script was read by the Metropolitan Police, who declined to cooperate with the series, claiming that they would never shoot an innocent person.
Presenter asks
16:29Was it a genuine ambition [to be an astronaut] at the time?
Yeah, actually it was. I had mates who were equally into science and we certainly talked about the space programme. But I was the only one who thought that there was any way that it might be something that I could do for a living.
Presenter asks
26:34How do you put yourself in the shoes of professional women characters?
Well firstly thank you very much for saying that but it it's not something that I feel that I'm consciously doing because all my primary experience of working in real workplaces were very gender balanced and when I was working in the NHS the blokes and the women did exactly the same work and so it didn't feel to me like there was a way that a a female doctor would behave in comparison to a male doctor. And even when I was in the RAF, you know, that was the time when women were first being accepted as pilots. So I've always been surrounded by women who've been doing the same job as the men. And because I write a lot about workplace drama, it's always felt to me that I would be quite naturally creating a gender balanced world.
Presenter asks
29:18What has been the critical moment from which everything else has cascaded?
I think that would have to be the fact that I saw that advert in the British Medical Journal. If I hadn't seen that, then I don't think I would ever have considered entering the career that I'm in now. And I really have to give credit to the people I was working with who were experienced television producers, firstly because they took a gamble on me, but also they provided me with an apprenticeship in writing for television. At first they were very careful and sympathetic about it, and I had to explain to them that I'd been through medical school. You know, I was used to learning through humiliation. They could tell me if something didn't work. Do you find it difficult sometimes? Working in the creative world? I think that I've become much more accustomed to it now. It was certainly true that when I first started there were occasions when completely unintentionally, because I wasn't a gushing lovy, people took things the wrong way and I I was used to a much more tough environment where you very rarely give credit where it's due. You just point out the things that aren't right. And I've discovered that that's not how you get on in the media.
“I actually really admire what my parents achieved, that they went on a journey where they had no idea what to expect. They uprooted and moved to a foreign country and they worked really hard. There was such a strong work ethic, and it was about creating a brighter future for their children than they'd experienced.”
“I think that that's something that is quite a constant presence in the life of junior hospital doctors. You've got to remember that a lot of the time you're dealing with people who aren't fully emotionally mature themselves. I was 23, 24 when I started practicing medicine as a junior house officer. And I remember starting on a Thursday and myself and the other SHO, my first job, the guy who I answered to immediately above me, we fundamentally ran the medical emergency receiving team for three days with very little input from consultants or registrars. And it was an extraordinary experience. And I remember within the first few days being in a situation where a man in late middle age came in with quite a severe bleed on the brain and the prospect certainly didn't look very good. And I remember his wife saying to me, don't let him die is all I've got. And that's a tough thing for someone who's 23 or 24 to handle. But it's amazing how you come through it. It's amazing how you find that resilience so that you can, within a few months, you're handling that in a way … that eventually makes you think the way that the very cynical character played by Helen Baxendale in Cardiac Arrest thought, where at the end of the first episode she says to the idealistic younger doctor, one day you'll worry about how little this bothers you, not how much.”
“I think that would have to be the fact that I saw that advert in the British Medical Journal. If I hadn't seen that, then I don't think I would ever have considered entering the career that I'm in now. And I really have to give credit to the people I was working with who were experienced television producers, firstly because they took a gamble on me, but also they provided me with an apprenticeship in writing for television. At first they were very careful and sympathetic about it, and I had to explain to them that I'd been through medical school. You know, I was used to learning through humiliation. They could tell me if something didn't work.”