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.

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?

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.

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.

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 the differences between American and British television dramas.

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

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.

It was an absolute pleasure working with Stephen Graham. I've admired his work for many years, and what he brings is that real sense of authenticity.

'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.

'Bodies' remains the drama I'm most proud of.

No one was more surprised than me by the success of the first series of 'Line of Duty.'

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

With 'Cardiac Arrest,' I wanted to show that there were times when doctors really didn't care.

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 believe that attributing flaws to medical characters makes them not just doctors but something more. It makes them people.

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

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.

I have a lot of respect for our police forces. They are generally honest and effective.

'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.

The things I discovered when writing 'Line of Duty' were the tools you have available to write a thriller.

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

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.