Creator, writer and star of Juice. Nominated for actor in a comedy.
Once in a while, as a writer, an idea comes along so compelling you burn to head to your laptop and start working on it straightaway. Secret Service, which was a Sunday Times bestseller and is now an ITV drama, was one of those moments.
It was 2017 and the world was spinning a lot faster on its axis: Brexit; Trump; the scandal the US President would come to term the “Russia hoax”, in which he stood accused of effectively being a Moscow Centre sleeper asset; allegations that the Russians had been trying to bribe or blackmail politicians across Europe…
This changing geopolitical environment was occupying my every working moment, as it was most journalists. It seemed to me that several things were obviously true: we were in a new Cold War, which was more complex and more dangerous than the old one, and one in which our enemies’ goals – undermining democratic norms and ultimately democracy itself – were considerably easier to achieve.
After all, there were plenty of Russian oligarchs sending their sons to Eton, and slipping into the milieu of Western elites was proving all too simple. And achieving their aims didn’t require the binary choices of old. If multiple allegations of Russian collusion in America were investigated and found untrue or unproven, the poisonous divisions fuelled by the very accusation itself remained. If we were in a new Cold War, it seemed to me that the Russians were winning.
One sunny afternoon, I was walking past the Secret Intelligence Service’s HQ in Vauxhall, London, when I started to wonder what it would be like for a real-life SIS officer to be wrestling with some of these issues. What if you were running an operation to bug some Moscow Centre bigwigs on vacation, which yielded the nuclear weapons-grade intelligence that the British Prime Minister had cancer and was about to resign – and that one of the candidates to replace him was some kind of Russian asset or spy? How would your superiors react? What if the Foreign Secretary, technically the boss of SIS, was one of the leading suspects?
Sometimes, an idea leads swiftly to characters and a storyline, but never (for me) so rapidly as in this case. Before I’d reached Westminster, I had an outline of the plot and a pretty clear idea of my lead character, Kate Henderson. I wanted her to be morally and physically courageous but a woman juggling teenage children and a happy family life with a job that makes enormous psychological, intellectual and sometimes physical demands.
Earlier on in my career for ITV News, I had been a foreign correspondent based in Asia. I had periodically been deployed to dangerous places, so I know what it’s like to have a young family and feel incredibly conflicted and uncertain about getting on a plane to a war zone. I also know what it feels like to be shot (Jakarta, 1999, in a riot). I wanted to bring all of that to the way I painted Kate. Courage in her world must inevitably come at a cost, both physical and emotional.
I wrote the novel faster than any other (I have just published my 11th) and what I do find curious when I look back at the speed with which Secret Service poured out of me is that it seems obvious that Kate – as a result of all the pressure heaped upon her – is skating on the edge of acute insomnia and some kind of breakdown. And shortly after I finished it, this is exactly what happened to me. I took three months off, rebooted and recovered. But when I read the book now, I do wonder at the way the character was a direct reflection of my own psychological state of mind.
That afternoon in Vauxhall, I originally conceived the story as a TV drama. Ever since I turned my first novel, Shadow Dancer, into a film (directed by Oscar-winner James Marsh and starring Andrea Riseborough, Clive Owen and Gillian Anderson), I had done a lot of screenwriting for various producers. I pitched the idea of Secret Service to a few of them, who were enthusiastic. But in the very act of pitching, I realised the idea was so clear in my head that I couldn’t wait around for the TV development process to unfold in order to write it.
The novel did gratifyingly well, climbing to near the top of the Sunday Times bestseller list in paperback. And as soon as it was done, I started work on the television drama I had always conceived. I decided by then that I wanted to turn each of my novels into a film or TV drama myself in partnership with Gail Egan (The Constant Gardener, A Most Wanted Man – among many other films), a brilliant producer I particularly rated and liked. She found me a great co-writer called Jemma
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