The 30 best TV crime dramas ever – ranked - The Telegraph
The 30 best TV crime dramas ever – ranked · 1. Inspector Morse (1987-2000) · 2. Cracker (1993-2006) · 3. Agatha Christie's Poirot (1989-2013).
Jed Mercurio
Anti-corruption predecessor Between the Lines narrowly missed out on our selection but it paved the way for writer <anchor>Jed Mercurio</anchor>’s bent copper blockbuster. This addictive thriller followed the waistcoat-clad work of professional standards unit AC-12 as they pursued a different dodgy officer each series – some of them scarily close to home. Across six fiendishly plotted series, it built into a serpentine conspiracy thriller about ties between law enforcement and organised crime, becoming known for its armed ambushes and extended interrogation scenes. It grew from a cult hit on BBC Two to a ratings record-breaker on BBC One. Will it return? Mother of God, we hope so. Read our Line of Duty review
Line of Duty writer Jed Mercurio on lies, plot holes and bringing back Bodyguard
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# Line of Duty writer Jed Mercurio on lies, plot holes and bringing back Bodyguard

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Jed Mercurio

Credit: Camera Press

"I don’t like journalists deliberately lying about my show because they wanna be smug or snide, and I will challenge that,” says Jed Mercurio. The writer of Line of Duty and Bodyguard, who gets audiences worked up like no other contemporary dramatist, is getting worked up, too.

We’re days away from the finale of another thrilling series of Line of Duty, one that has had viewers rushing to social media to scream “Oh my God!” at the end of almost every episode, as protagonists and much-loved characters alike have been killed off. I’ve been chatting to the 53-year-old Mercurio about his penchant for getting involved in social media scraps himself. Just this week he launched a tirade at a Sun writer who claimed that one of the show’s stars had been offered a contract for two more series. “This story is a lie,” he wrote, before calling the journalist a “c---”.

Last year, as Bodyguard gripped the nation, he attacked a series of articles criticising his riveting drama about a home secretary sleeping with her personal protection officer, as a female suicide bomber targeted civilians. “A hatchet job,” he railed, “another factually incorrect, distorted piece”, and, finally, for the Spectator’s James Delingpole, “What a p----”.

“If a critic says I didn’t like that show, then that’s their opinion and I don’t care,” Mercurio says. “If they say this was a plot hole, they’re putting that forward as a fact and what I am saying is either they are mistaken, or they are deliberately lying.”

In series five of Line of Duty, of course, we’ve all been choking on diesel to discover that the head of anti-corruption unit AC-12, Adrian Dunbar’s Ted Hastings, may – mother of God – be a bent copper himself. But a recent piece in the Telegraph titled “ Why Line of Duty has become too clever for its own good” had Mercurio spitting. He says the writer has been “the only person recently who has been stupid enough” to list what he thought were plot holes, and “made a complete idiot of himself”.

Line of Duty's stars: Adrian Dunbar (left), Martin Compston and Vicky McClure

Line of Duty's stars: Adrian Dunbar (left), Martin Compston and Vicky McClure
Credit: BBC/World Productions

Accusations of plot holes are not the only thing Mercurio’s bothered about. Despite its record-breaking 17.1 million audience, Bodyguard shipped some flak. One repeated criticism was that Mercurio’s suicide bomber Nadia ( Anjli Mohindra), who performed a switch from brainwashed “victim” to engineer mastermind, was an Islamophobic depiction. “There’s a lot of data about female jihadists,” Mercurio says. “One of the most significant threats to our national security was and is home-grown Islamist terrorism. That’s not my opinion, that is a conclusion put forward by all the bodies who are responsible for our national security, from MI5, from counterterrorism police… that’s just a fact.”

The show’s other shocking twist was when Keeley Hawes’s home secretary Julia Montague was killed in a terrorist bombing halfway through the series. Mercurio has no problems with blowing up, burning or throwing his characters out of open windows when the moment comes. In this series of Line of Duty, he has slit the throats of AC-12’s Maneet Bindra ( Maya Sondhi) and rogue undercover officer John Corbett (Stephen Graham), to general horror. It’s all part of “creating a sense of genuine jeopardy”, he says. “These characters operate in a dangerous world, so it has the effect of showing that no one is safe… In some series out there, that jeopardy is very obviously fake. You know that something bad isn’t going to happen to the characters because they’ve got to be in the next episode.”

Mercurio specialises in morally compromised characters. Was it inevitable that he would drag Hastings himself into that zone? “What we do is show that public servants often have conflicting agendas,” he says. We all face moral grey areas, “whether we tell the truth or whether we lie to protect ourselves or our relationships”. It was always part of the design for Line of Duty that the guest lead character in each series would operate in a grey area, he tells me, but in this series, we’ve seen the extent to which Steve Arnott’s relationship with Corbett “compromised Steve’s judgment. We do that with all our characters, and obviously there’s currently a lot of attention around Hastings…” It’s this that makes the audience feel that the characters are like real people, he believes, “whereas a lot of villains are so committed to a dark agenda that they become a caricature”.

Stephen Graham as Corbett

Stephen Graham as Corbett
Credit: BBC/World Productions

I wonder if he might apply the same principles if he were asked to write a Bond script, but he will only talk about his own projects. The plot of Line of Duty wasn’t worked out from the start, he says, but he does have “some overall idea where the story can go in future” (series six is already commissioned). Though he has written every episode of Line of Duty and Bodyguard, he doesn’t have the final say. “It’s up to the BBC to approve scripts and the cuts of the episodes once filmed.” In series three of Line of Duty, which featured a paedophilia plot line, Mercurio wanted to make a correlation with real cases where “complaints had been made with regard to child sexual exploitation and police investigations had not been pursued – and deliberately not pursued – and we felt the best example of that was Jimmy Savile. The BBC was uncomfortable with references to Savile… we had to justify why it was relevant to the drama, and we were able to do that.”

While it sometimes seems no institution is safe from Mercurio’s pen – he wrote the brilliant Bodies (2004) about NHS surgeons covering up botched operations – he says he has no plans to write a series about the BBC.

On Sunday, Mercurio will be the subject of an episode of The South Bank Show on Sky Arts. His parents, economic migrants from Italy, came over separately in about 1950 and settled in Nelson, Lancashire, where they met and married. Mercurio was born in 1966. His father was a miner, then a factory worker; his mother also worked in factories. He considers himself British and working-class.

The family moved to Cannock in the West Midlands when he was five – his voice still has a hint of the Black Country about it – and he went to “the local comp” before winning a place at Birmingham University Medical School on a full grant to study to be a doctor. “I was looking to do something that would lead to gainful employment. I didn’t study writing or drama or anything like that… that was not really a viable route for me.”

He points out that “the barriers do exist” for working-class people who want to get into television, especially now that the grant system has been abolished. “Look at [Line of Duty’s] Vicky McClure – she succeeded in her application to drama school, but didn’t have the funds to take up the place. Martin Compston didn’t go to drama school either and he comes from an ordinary working-class background… this is something that isn’t just about TV and the arts, it’s about social mobility as a whole in this country.”

His own shift of career came by chance. He answered a small ad asking for writers with a medical background, and sent off some scenes that ultimately grew into the BBC’s Nineties hospital drama Cardiac Arrest. But it wasn’t until the third series, he says, that writing became a better-paid option than being a doctor. He returned to writing about the medical profession in Sky One’s Critical, which wasn’t a hit when it ran for one series in 2015.

Andrew Lancel and Helen Baxendale in Cardiac Arrest

Andrew Lancel and Helen Baxendale in Cardiac Arrest
Credit: ITV

Not everything he’s written has been – his sci-fi drama Invasion: Earth was not universally loved, and there were some grumblings about the liberties taken in his adaptation of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. But, right now, his name almost guarantees a hit. Surely, Netflix and Amazon must have come knocking? He’s a freelance writer “constantly in conversations about other projects”, he says, but he won’t confirm any new ones.

In The South Bank Show he is harsh about the medical profession, which nurtured him, as well as the country’s other great institutions. Most are not in great shape, he believes: “Standards in public life have decayed over time… Incompetence is the norm.” Why has this happened? “Fundamentally, by a lack of investment in our public services… what you end up with is a good many people who are delivering the service have become frustrated… not doing the best possible job is the reality they are resigned to.” He singles out the police and the NHS, though he tells me he’s very proud that his daughter, Molly, 19, is at medical school in Newcastle, while his 15-year-old son Jack “talks about being a police officer. He really understands what an important job police do.” (Mercurio is married to producer and script editor Elaine Cameron.)

So can he tell us anything about Bodyguard 2 ? “No,” he says. Is Richard Madden going to be in it? “We’re still in talks,” he flat-bats again. “We’re just looking at the logistics of doing a second one. We haven’t reached the end point of those discussions.”

Before that, millions of us will be tuning into the finale of Line of Duty to find out whether the identity of “H” is finally revealed. As Ted Hastings might say, there’s only one thing we’re interested in, and that’s catching bent coppers… although viewers who want to know more about the real criminal mastermind – Mercurio himself – might want to switch over afterwards.

The feature-length finale of Line of Duty is on Sunday at 9pm on BBC One and will be followed by a special episode of The South Bank Show at 10:30pm on Sky Arts

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