YouSaid · the spoken record

Jed Mercurio

lines on the record: 48
first: 2019-04-18
most recent: 2019-04-18
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yeah. Yeah. And that's something that is, it's not just something that kind of formed me in relation to the direct experience of being bullied or stigmatized for being foreign or a foreign extraction. It was also something that informed my experience of making TV. Watching TV when I was growing up, there was a kind of an assumption that the only people watching the programs were white British people and therefore it was okay to have jokes or even worse that were directed at foreigners or people of other ethnicities. And that sense of being excluded from the mainstream of British life was something that I wanted to fight against. So I have always played down, or I always played down my Italian roots. It's only really sort of now in middle age that I'm much more open about it.”
2019-04-18 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Jed Mercurio One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I think it was a child I felt a strong pressure to assimilate that I grew up in a small town that wasn't anywhere near as diverse as the city I'm fortunate to live in now. Having a foreign name, having parents who had foreign accents, that was something that was a little bit stigmatizing. And I don't mean that in any way that's disrespectful to my parents. It's just that that's the way it was back then.”
2019-04-18 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Jed Mercurio One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Probably not the writer to do it, but I think there are plenty of writers who write very well about politics who might be able to have a stab at that. I mean, I would actually, just to characterize my remark, I would say that I didn't for a moment believe that the West Wing was a true reflection of American politics. In fact, at times it was very clearly running counter to what was happening in US politics at that time. But what it did do was show procedure that certainly the wide audience appeared to be authentic and very detailed.”
2019-04-18 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Jed Mercurio One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A drama can do that. I think it depends what the parameters of the drama are. I think if you were to approach doing a political drama where it was intent on demystifying politics, showing the interior world of politics. So what I'm getting at is something like maybe a British equivalent of the West Wing. That kind of approach. I think it might be quite interesting to do that.”
2019-04-18 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Jed Mercurio One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I don't know how robust that data is. I think that people's primary experience of, say, the NHS or policing is much more powerful than the influence of drama. But what you have to take into account is what proportion of the population are having regular encounters with medical professionals or the”
2019-04-18 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Jed Mercurio One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I still are. Yeah, but it's just something that kind of, I think it smells of inauthenticity. It's like when they make up the names of football teams, you know, Liverton versus Everpool. You spotted.”
2019-04-18 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Jed Mercurio One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, no, I think that television news is probably the most powerful influence on political thinking than what newspaper they read. I think political dramas are unlikely to be influential because there's a great pressure not to be party political. So if you were to make a political drama you might be under pressure to fictionalize the name of a political party, which was a pressure I resisted on bodyguard. I thought it was silly to invent a political party. So Julia Montague, the character played by Keeley Hawes, was a conservative because it felt a fairly safe bet at the time that we went into production that the Conservatives would Remain in government. I mean, they've come close to proving me wrong.”
2019-04-18 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Jed Mercurio One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's something that we're in talks about. We haven't reached a point where we can 100% commit to doing more. Obviously, we're delighted that so many people want to see more, but it's quite a complex negotiation to decide how we're going to go about doing that.”
2019-04-18 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Jed Mercurio One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think that it then ends up working on people who don't know because what they do is they recognize that there's something distinctive about a drama series. So I would say it probably works on two levels. The first is that you are working in a crowded market cop shows so having something as a distinctive identity for the series is very helpful in terms of getting it commissioned and people recognising it and following it. And then the other side of it is the fact that, yeah, I'm pretty hung up on authenticity. I know it's not possible to be 100% authentic in a TV drama because it is artifice. But if you can do your best to follow procedures to the letter and show the complexity of modern policing, then that helps you on your journey towards showing a more A more revisionist portrait of how police officers are.”
2019-04-18 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Jed Mercurio One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A kind of target culture had come into policing, which was something that had been absent before. And if I was to identify one thing that made me want to write line of duty when I did, it was the fact that I didn't think there was any police drama that had portrayed 21st century policing. You didn't see police dramas in which they talked about the target culture of having to solve a certain number of crimes in a certain period of time”
2019-04-18 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Jed Mercurio One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, fundamentally a police series in which honest, diligent, competent police officers catch the bad guys by the end of the hour. And there's plenty of that that does go on in the real world. But what interests me in terms of the portrayal of an institution is what happens when the machine breaks down? Why are some police officers very cynical about the job they do? And it goes back to the parallels with writing about the NHS. People don't go into medicine already cynical. Something makes them cynical, and their cynicism then has consequences to how they practice their jobs. And we were seeing the same with the police. And the reason for that was purely about the timing, the way in which”
2019-04-18 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Jed Mercurio One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, having worked in the emergency services you have contact with the police, so I certainly knew police officers and had the same opinion of them as I had of doctors, which is that they're regular people, there's good and bad, and the view of people outside of the police is largely coloured by what they see on TV. And if you talk to people who have direct experience of the police, they have a very different view of what it's like in comparison to what Tony Garnett used to call the drama of reassurance, Tony Garnett being someone whose career spanned decades from things like Kathy come home right through to the series about police corruption. The nineties call between the lines.”
2019-04-18 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Jed Mercurio One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that's absolutely right, Nick. And I think one of the things that I said repeatedly in relation to cardiac Christ and also with bodies is that there's good and bad in every profession That the idea of putting doctors on a pedestal. Meant that other dramas ended up in a situation where the events in the series just weren't credible, that people just Of a particular type that didn't represent what real life was like. And that also then ended up being an obstacle to exploring the issues that arise from that kind of behavior and the issues that have caused that kind of behavior.”
2019-04-18 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Jed Mercurio One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“She certainly was, yeah. This was Virginia Bottomley who wrote a piece where she said it was about as realistic as Carry On Doctor. And that was just an example of a massive own goal. It really showed how out of touch she was. And rather than addressing the serious issues that were brought up, whereas a lot of commentators did see that Showing the level of cynicism and the level of stress that was on a particular section of the NHS was symptomatic of wider problems.”
2019-04-18 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Jed Mercurio One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I wrote it under a pseudonym because I was still practicing as a hospital doctor at that time and I had no idea how this series was going to be received. And people who were working on it had no idea either and they advised me that I might want to kind of retain a little bit of anonym”
2019-04-18 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Jed Mercurio One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But there was a whole side of the NHS, particularly the side that you would see as a junior hospital doctor, which was of people really pushed to the limits of their competence and their tolerance for the demands of the system, working incredibly long hours carrying out procedures you weren't really trained for a lack of supervision. And all these things seem to be ingrained in the way junior hospital doctors were treated. And that's something that just wasn't being portrayed on these other series.”
2019-04-18 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Jed Mercurio One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Until I saw an advert in the British medical journal, a television production company were looking for medical advisors for a new medical drama they had in development. And at that time, I just started working as a hospital doctor. And even over the course of just the first few weeks, I became aware that what was being portrayed on conventional medical dramas like casualty and other series that were on back then, this is sort of the early 90s, had a very rose-tinted view of the NHS.”
2019-04-18 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Jed Mercurio One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“RAF as a doctor, yeah, yeah, I grew up in a very ordinary town in the West Midlands. I went to a comprehensive. I didn't really do drama. I was a kind of science-y kid and I needed to get a proper job. So I went to medical school back when you could get a grant and I got a grant to go. And yeah, and while I was there, I became interested in aviation medicine and enlisted in the RAF. And that was really where I was heading. I was heading towards working in aviation medicine.”
2019-04-18 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Jed Mercurio One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's probably true of our larger institutions, particularly ones that have been around for a long time. And I think that there's a commonly held view of people who've been inside of those institutions who are trying to get them to do the right thing, that they've gone the way of a lot of institutions where they become more focused on their own interests rather than what they were designed for in the first place.”
2019-04-18 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Jed Mercurio One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Doing the wrong thing for the wrong reasons and people trying to do the right thing for the right reasons. And that ends up just being very polarized into a story of goodies and baddies. And if we see the way in which people respond to politics, they can have allegiances to both. So I think it would be a real challenge.”
2019-04-18 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Jed Mercurio One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that there would be room for all of those things. One of the things that we struggle with online of duty is making the antagonist, the corrupt police officer who's under investigation in each series, someone that you can empathize with. Because most corrupt police officers in real life, you couldn't. They're fundamentally just greedy bastards. So they're doing a lot of harm and they're taking money for it. There's nothing else going on. Whereas what we try and do is create some kind of moral quandary for the police officer so that when they're presented as being corrupt, a little bit later we find out that maybe they did the wrong thing for the right reasons. So I certainly think that you can do that in a political drama. I think the real worry is that the real world correlates feature people who are”
2019-04-18 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Jed Mercurio One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I hope there'll be a correction. I hope that in the way that you genuinely see a regression to the mean, I'm hoping that that may well happen in politics and that the centre ground will be seized.”
2019-04-18 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Jed Mercurio One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then you look at the Labour Party and the way in which that has lurched the left and the way it's run and the way that it's kind of its internal debate about leave will remain applies to whether Jews should be allowed to leave or remain.”
2019-04-18 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Jed Mercurio One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've actually voted in my life for all three main political parties. And I don't have a party political allegiance. I've been an active voter and I do follow politics. And I've tried to vote for the party and the prime minister who I thought would do the best job for the country as a whole. And that has changed over the years. So at the moment, I'm probably what you might call a sort of frustrated centerist that I look at the way the Conservative Party is going and it's lurching to the right. You see the kinds of people who are the faces of the ERG, to use an acronym. In a minute, it says something, a figure like Jacob Reese Mogg is considered to be the acceptable face of that faction”
2019-04-18 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Jed Mercurio One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think that what I mean, it's a bigger issue. And what I would start off by saying is that what I'm not talking about is ideology. So I'm very engaged by conversations between people on either side of the debate who are discussing their competing ideologies. One being about being part of a European community and one about being a country on its own. Those are ideologies and I think those can be sincerely held. It's a different thing when you start talking about what the consequences would be if we were to politically change the status quo in respect of our relationship with the European Union. Very deliberate lies were told in order to enable people who had an ideological leaning towards leaving the EU to feel that there might not be the kinds of consequences that I think most inform people believe there will be.”
2019-04-18 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Jed Mercurio One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think one side was particularly guilty. And again, it's not a criticism of the deceived. It's a criticism of the deceivers. It was just very frustrating that people were saying things that were very clearly not true. Well, I think certain things about what would happen if we were to leave the EU were very clearly deceptions.”
2019-04-18 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Jed Mercurio One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“God, no. I think so many of them are at it. Yeah, we've now seen this situation where we had a referendum in which there was so much deception going on.”
2019-04-18 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Jed Mercurio One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm frustrated by the way in which the value of facts and evidence has really suffered. And it's reached a point where I think politicians are doing something that in the past was unthinkable. In the past it was unthinkable to challenge the sanctity of facts. It was much more about the interpretation. Whereas now I think they're playing into the hands of people who struggle to absorb complex information and they're letting them off. They're saying it's okay to reject rationalism and go with your gut instinct no matter if that leads you in the wrong direction. That kind of thing frustrates me. And what frustrates me about it is the way in which certain politicians now revel in being able to deceive. I'm not criticizing the people who are being deceived. I'm criticizing the deceivers.”
2019-04-18 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Jed Mercurio One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Who also played the Home Secretary in Bodyguard? Her character was outwardly antagonistic to AC-12. She was someone who Very definitely was against the idea of manipulating events. She was a liar, but then she would actually say you can't lie about scientific truths because no one will believe you.”
2019-04-18 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Jed Mercurio One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And all the AC12 characters who aren't baddies. And the same really in my NHS dramas. The characters who believe in doing the right thing, but also they believe in facts and evidence. Even the character that Keeley Hawes played in line of duty for two series.”
2019-04-18 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Jed Mercurio One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think that I do write characters who have certain characteristics. And one of them is that the characters that we're meant to get behind.”
2019-04-18 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Jed Mercurio One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can approach writing about an institution in terms of how it's funded and how it's structured. There are certain zeitgeist issues that affect institutions. And I suppose an example of that would be in series three of line of duty where I wanted to tackle the war on rationalism. So one of the characters, a very senior police officer early in the series says There are the facts and then there's the truth as if those two things are separate. And if you kind of look at the way that the world has gone over really the last few decades, the importance of evidence, the importance of rationalism has been downplayed and what that has allowed to happen is the rise of politicians who have a non-exclusive relationship with the truth.”
2019-04-18 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Jed Mercurio One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think Writing dramas that deal in subjects relating to institutions, you're inevitably going to bump up against things which may have a synchronicity with the outside world. And so because I've written about the NHS and I've written about the police, those things inevitably are informed by what's going on in the wider world. So it's not necessarily just the fact that”
2019-04-18 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Jed Mercurio One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly because once these people retire, they're all about making money. Maybe that's not all of them. Maybe that's unfair.”
2019-04-18 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Jed Mercurio One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We didn't actually get any input from politicians. The simple reason for that is that people who've held high office are quite expensive. It's as simple as that. So if you approach a couldn't have...”
2019-04-18 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Jed Mercurio One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A bit of both. I mean, I do follow politics. I do watch the news every day, at least once, sometimes more. And I am fascinated by that world. I'm fascinated by the personalities and by the party politics. And it's an interesting mixture of all the things that make good drama. But obviously I don't know the inside world, the hidden world of politics. So on bodyguard, we were very lucky that Saleh Lewis, a former permanent secretary, agreed to be our advisor and he was incredibly helpful.”
2019-04-18 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Jed Mercurio One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not in mine. No, because I wouldn't have made that mistake because I wouldn't never have. Banked on the fact that we would leave the EU on the appointed date.”
2019-04-18 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Jed Mercurio One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But a lot of people out there didn't think that. There are things now in the can, so to speak, which are going to go on air, where people have had to go back into the episodes because there was an assumption that we would have left the EU by now.”
2019-04-18 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Jed Mercurio One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. And the other thing is that you tend to commit to what the content of a drama is about six months, maybe even a year before it's going to be on TV. So you could end up in a situation where it becomes out of date, it becomes completely irrelevant. So one of the decisions we chose to make in Bodyguard was to have no references to Brexit.”
2019-04-18 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Jed Mercurio One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think so. I think it remains an area of interest for me. And I think the real challenge, Nick, is that politics changes faster than you can make television dramas. Over the course of the, it was probably about three years working on Bodyguard, a lot of things changed and certain events in terms of Terror attacks on Westminster and so forth and the Jo Cox tragedy, things like that all happened during the development process, which are things that hadn't happened before I started work on it.”
2019-04-18 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Jed Mercurio One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's just about finding high stakes for characters. I think that if you do a kind of drama like I do, which is called precinct drama, it's set in the workplace, then you're always looking for a workplace where the stakes are sufficiently high that the audience can be convinced that the characters can take the kinds of steps they need to take in order to for it to be dramatic. If you work in a very ordinary job and actually no matter what you do, you can't get fired and the rewards for success are low, then it's very hard to create drama out of that. Whereas if you are in an environment where the rewards for success are very high and the consequences of failure are extreme, then you get a situation where characters may do things where they're testing the boundaries of their own ethics.”
2019-04-18 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Jed Mercurio One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. The original conversation with the BBC was about claiming that space for a drama. So there hadn't been an out and out political thriller on TV in the UK for a long time. There'd been ones in the States, such as House of Cards, which is obviously an adaptation of an original British series. But I think you probably would have to go back to something like Paul Abbott's series, which is nearly 20 years ago.”
2019-04-18 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Jed Mercurio One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think that's a good point. I think that when Bodyguard went through the process of being conceived, initially it was absolutely going to be a political drama slash thriller. It was only as I got more into it that I decided to make it a kind of version of a police drama and we would tell the story from the viewpoint of the specialist protection officer and go in that direction. But the idea was about showing a kind of version of politics that I suppose you could describe as cutthroat and that the drama came through The fact that the stakes are so high in terms of the political life of our country and when I started working on the series the stakes weren't as high as they became over the course of development.”
2019-04-18 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Jed Mercurio One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think we were all thrilled that we kind of reached that level of audience. But yeah, shocking. It was just something that you just don't anticipate, particularly if you're making something brand new, like Bodyguard, where we had no real idea how it was going to perform. And there's always the possibility that the first episode goes out on a night where there's very strong competition or the people just don't warm to the trailers or anything can happen. So you are a hostage to fortune. So I think that we were just very fortunate with... The way it was scheduled, the impact that the cast had on the audience, and then it just seemed to gather momentum from that.”
2019-04-18 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Jed Mercurio One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's pretty rare that happens, Nick. Unless I'm out with the cast, which does happen when we're filming, certainly when we're filming Line of Duty, we're out and about in Belfast quite a lot, which is where we film. And we do get recognised and we do get into conversations. That's lovely when people have nice things to say about the series. But generally, I'm pretty anonymous.”
2019-04-18 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Jed Mercurio One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You haven't filmed two versions. It's something that is... It takes us in interesting places, is the way I would describe it.”
2019-04-18 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Jed Mercurio One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The number of people who genuinely know right now is probably less than a dozen. And I'm looking forward to the day when it can be measured in millions.”
2019-04-18 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Jed Mercurio One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bridges across the Thames. Rebellion, a new direct action protest group hoped to take control of this and other key London locations for up to two weeks, but today police moved in and made more arrests.”
2019-04-18 · Political Thinking with Nick Robinson · The Jed Mercurio One · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source