Jed Mercurio
Desert Island Discs
BBC
4.3 • 14.3K Ratings
🗓️ 18 June 2017
⏱️ 35 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Kirsty Young's castaway is Jed Mercurio. Creator of Line of Duty, and an award-winning TV writer, producer, director and novelist, he is one of the few British script-writers to work as an American-style show-runner. A former hospital doctor and RAF officer, he has been ranked among UK television's leading writers by TV industry magazine Broadcast.
His Italian parents moved to the UK after the Second World War and he was brought up in Cannock in the Midlands. Keen on science as a child, with dreams of becoming an astronaut, he studied medicine at Birmingham University. While there, he applied for the RAF medical doctor programme and learned to fly.
While he was working as a hospital doctor, he answered an advertisement in the British Medical Journal seeking advisors for a medical TV drama. Despite negligible writing experience, he went on to script the BBC medical drama Cardiac Arrest. Its continuing success led him to leave medicine and embark on a successful career as a scriptwriter. His chief works for TV are the series Line of Duty, Bodies, The Grimleys and Cardiac Arrest. He's also written books: Bodies; Ascent; American Adulterer, and for children, The Penguin Expedition.
Producer: Cathy Drysdale.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is the BBC. |
| 0:03.3 | Hello, I'm Kirstie Young. |
| 0:05.2 | Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Discs from BBC Radio 4. |
| 0:09.6 | For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the Radio broadcast. |
| 0:14.0 | For more information about the programme, please visit bbc.co.uk-radio4. |
| 0:30.0 | My cast away this week is the writer, producer and director, Jed Mercurio. |
| 0:47.1 | Three words, line of duty. |
| 0:49.2 | In no way does it represent the breadth of his work, but it's certainly a shorthand for the depth. |
| 0:54.5 | If you watched any of the past four series of the drama, centering on police corruption, |
| 0:58.7 | then you'll be more than familiar with my guest's ability to turn out |
| 1:02.8 | deftly breathtaking plots, gut-churning subversions and sofa-gripping conclusions. |
| 1:08.3 | He's tasted success before. |
| 1:09.8 | Cardiac arrest, the grimleys and bodies are some of his other big TV hits. |
| 1:14.7 | If the narrative arc of his own life was anywhere near predictable, then by rights, |
| 1:18.4 | he shouldn't be doing any of it. |
| 1:19.9 | He's a fully trained doctor and pilot, and as a kid, |
| 1:23.1 | had his heart set on being an astronaut. |
| 1:25.8 | But his, like all good storylines, involves its share of unexpected twists and turns. |
| 1:30.6 | He says, TV is a fantastic home for people who want to write creatively. |
| 1:36.1 | It requires persistence. |
| 1:37.6 | You have to be hungry and able to deal with rejection. |
| 1:41.0 | If you care about your work and your talent, then you will succeed. |
... |
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