Heres a spoiler-filledpost-finale chat).
He gives precise, categorical answers unfurred by the usual hesitations and rambling false starts.
He speaks fluently in terms of suppositions, anecdotal evidence, arithmetical means and statistical outliers.
When he completes a given response, he simply stops talking.
Mercurios voice only became heated twice in the next six thousand words.
Hes only human, after all.
For instance, watching Keeley Hawes reacting to Dryden being arrested on TV in series two?
There are a number of elements in this.
The first one is the script.
Often those things will just be very clearly scripted.
Then the other side of it is editing.
One of the things I learned on medical dramaBodieswas that actors cant play ambiguity.
Youve pre-empted my next question.
What we discover in series three is that Dots a reluctant plant within the police.
Its a different mind-set.
People can lie to themselves.
Its that thing where no-one wants to see themselves as a villain, however villainous their actions.
Their thinking is warped entirely around justifying their own actions.
and thats exactly what he said about the psyche of the criminal.
As a thriller writer, do you like to keep your audience feeling anxious at all times?
Is it in your interest to keep viewers anxious, to take away certainties?
I think its more tension, can we say tension?
One of the things we need to do is test characters.
Its a pretty fundamental principle that you only know if someones a good guy by testing them.
But also, it really helps if its a very finely balanced choice.
In terms of Ted, its always been about finding the things that really get under his skin.
He was prepared to do that.
You mention Teds marriage.
I think its all those things.
Part of me isnt that interested as a person and a viewer in peoples personal lives.
Im much more interested in what people do in the workplace and what goals they set themselves.
I guess thats why I write a lot of precinct drama.
But if you dont need to go into their personal lives to do that.
If you might play it out within their professional sphere, then you dont need to.
Thats kind of the balance that I look for.
The odds seem really stacked against decency in your work.
Do you consider your writing to be realist in that respect, or pessimist?
And in the police investigations inLine Of Duty, theyre investigating incidents of police misconduct or corruption.
Is your approach that its all fair game, drama shouldnt be PR for these services?
I dont know that it actually does amount to undermining public trust when youre just dealing with anecdotal evidence.
Line Of Dutycertainly isnt the drama of reassurance.
Its quite a destabilising experience as a viewer.
I would say that I didnt invent police corruption for the purpose of the series!
How I would encapsulate it is that Savile is crucial to this understanding.
Jimmy Savile cultivated relationships with senior police officers.
Jimmy Savile boasted of his relationships with senior police officers.
So we know what Jimmy Savile was getting out of those relationships with senior police officers.
It was obviously seen as a controversial decision, but you felt, a necessary one.
You must feel theres a purpose to a drama likeLine Of Dutybeyond cliff-hangers and hooks.
That youre presenting things through drama that need to be brought into the open?
There are a number of ways of looking at this.
What weknowis that about six million people have watched each episode ofLine Of Dutyso far.
Thats composed of the three and half million who watch live and the people who watch in other ways.
There will be differences in opinion.
They make the audience ask questions about the world outside of the drama.
Moving to the cliff-hanger of episode five, when did you settle on Lindsay Dentons death as her ending?
I guess this is part of the characters self-denial.
She honestlybecause she is slightly unhingedbelieves that all can be forgiven.
That has to be part of the outcome that shes striving for.
Its always been a possibility.
It was a possibility in series two.
She did manage to escape with the money and she was off to have a new life.
In the end, we decided not to do that.
Once you get into this, some things feel inevitable but nothing ever is, really.
Could it equally have been someone else Dot killed in that car?
Steve or Kate, for instance?
No, those wouldnt have been the scenarios.
The obvious scenario is that it could go the other way.
because thats where we were, so that was the reason.
I thought dramaticallythatwas the best option but downstream it was the most problematic and thats why I rejected it.
I suppose you have to adopt quite a sanguine approach to all this then, as a programme-maker?
When I seek out this information and I see the graphs and charts, my head doesnt swim.
So I am able to just look at that data and say Okay, we did a good job.
Lets pass that on to the team.
Whats your approach to pace?
There are script meetings where someone says do you really want to have got that far so quickly?
What are we going to do in the rest of the series?!
You cant kill Danny now!
Youre supposed to do that at the end!
or whatever it is, so we do do that.
It ends up coming back to the same point.
I kind of approach it in that way.
Fundamentally, its because were playing the shot thats in front of us.
I know that I can play the next shot and so thats how I approach it.
You mention killing off Danny Waldron and burning through so much of his plot so quickly.
Were you doing the same thing with Danny when you had him chatting up Rachel in episode one?
No, actually, those are two separate thought processes.
With Danny, the plan wasnt to kill him off at the end.
That was a unilateral decision made by me after I delivered the second draft.
Because I was writing episode two in which Danny was walking around alive and well.
So, thats where that came from.
The two processes were very different.
Your interview scenes inLine Of Dutyare masterfully written and performed.
And two) Have you ever considered a stunt episode, entirely set inside an interview room?
We do end up in the edit sometimes cutting bits out.
I kind of started working on that idea.
Tell me something, does Tony Gates have a box-set ofThe Wireat home?
Well if it was Lennie, itd be a bottle of Shiraz!
[Laughs] Are you familiar with Emerson?
The original quote is from Emerson [Ralph Waldo].
If I stole it, I would say.
If I borrow lines from elsewhere, Im really open about it.
You do include cheeky meta-jokes sometimes dont you.
In Bodies, I remember Rob saying This isnt television for instance.
Or Dot saying This isnt the Bronx, even.
Youre not above including little funny moments like that.
Yeah, I probably ought to be above it by now.
I think Ive been doing it long enough that I cant really say Im an outsider.
The other thing thats really hard is portraying television within television.
You do your best.
I was ponderously thinking it was all a metaphor…
[Laughs] Its cheap.
You dont have to pay a lot of money for the rights to show it.
Thats what that signalled.
Finally then, which institution is next for the Jed Mercurio treatment?
Ive got various things in development, but nothing thats been picked up for production yet.
Im basically doing Line Of Duty 4.
Then after that Ill probably be asking the BBC if we can doLine Of Duty5.
Jed Mercurio, thank you very much!
