Line of Duty a show of 'genuine jeopardy'

The Line of Duty writer says none of his characters are safe.

Ahead of the Line of Duty finale, writer Jed Mercurio tells Chris Harvey about lies, plot holes and keeping us in suspense.

'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 social media scraps. Just this week he launched a tirade at a Sun writer who claimed 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 something unpublishable.

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 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".

Jed Mercurio. Photo / Getty Images

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' 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 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".

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 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."