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.
'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.
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.
The success of 'Bodyguard' is a tribute to the magnetism of our two leads, Richard Madden and Keeley Hawes.
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 properly regulated research in stem-cell biotechnology will lead to many valuable improvements in medical treatment and that objections on religious or ethical grounds should be vigorously opposed.
'Line of Duty' is a social realist drama, so it's set in a world that has the recognisable features of the authentic world we see around us.
One of the things I learned on medical drama 'Bodies' was that actors can't play ambiguity.
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.
I didn't study writing or drama or anything like that... that was not really a viable route for me.
For something like 'Line of Duty' to work, it has to be both plausible and unexpected.
I think that the general public understands that its own doctors are human, fallible, and flawed.
One of the most significant threats to our national security was and is home-grown Islamist terrorism.
There's a classic medical aphorism: 'Listen to the patient; they're telling you the diagnosis.' Actually, a lot of patients are just telling you a lot of rubbish, and you have to stop them and ask the pertinent questions. But, yes, in both drama and medicine, isolated facts can accumulate to create the narrative.
I would compare my 'Frankenstein' to Cronenberg's remake of 'The Fly.' The monster in the original Fifties version of 'The Fly' was a crude, anatomical combination of man and insect, whereas Cronenberg's version exploited knowledge of DNA to depict him as a transgenic chimera.
Nowadays, you can't broadcast dodgy special effects and then put up a caption saying, 'Sorry, this is what the budget was.' You have to do it with high production values because the audience has been spoilt by the special effects on things like 'The X Files' and 'Independence Day.'
With 'Cardiac Arrest,' I wanted to show that there were times when doctors really didn't care.
Sci-fi gives you the scope to do grand stories.
'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.
As a content creator, all you can do is do your best work and then hope that it resonates somehow with an audience.
