Bodyguard producer ‘reasonably confident’ season 2 is coming in ‘due course’

Simon Heath, the CEO of World Productions, started out as a wannabe sports journo, before landing a scriptwriting job on Byker Grove.

Since then he’s played a part in launching Ant and Dec’s career, and collaborated with Jed Mercurio on huge dramas like Line of Duty and Bodyguard.

Before the launch of the seventh series of Line Of Duty, Simon shares a look behind the scenes of how these shows get made.

What is the most satisfying part of your job?

The excitement when you first find an idea you love and think, ‘Somebody might make this.’ The minute you get a broadcaster interested – usually the commissioning of the script.

Getting the phone call to say the broadcaster is making it. Then the moment when you see the first cut of the episode. You’re either getting very, very excited… or worried!

How has your collaboration with Line Of Duty writer Jed Mercurio evolved over the six series?

Jed brought the idea for Line Of Duty to us at World Productions over ten years ago. His first writing commission, Cardiac Arrest, was with World Productions in the early 1990s. Jed is as excited about season six as he is about season one.

Doesn’t Jed have a unique way of writing, where he doesn’t plot out everything before giving you the scripts?

He wanted to replicate the experience of an audience watching a show for the first time with our script team so our reactions weren’t coloured by, ‘No, but we planned it like that, didn’t we?’

Does that mean you can be reading the scripts and suddenly he shocks you by killing someone off?

The first moment where it hit home how well this could work was when we got the outline for the second episode of the first season of Line Of Duty. Gina McKee’s character, Jackie Laverty, is killed.

When we talked at the beginning, the whole show had been built around the fact that Lennie James’s character, DCI Tony Gates, was protecting this relationship he was having with Jackie.

So we imagined that character running right till the end of the series. When he killed her off, I was like, ‘Oh my God!’

When you turned to Bodyguard was there more pressure to match the success of Line Of Duty?

I knew it would be compared to Line Of Duty but the excitement I was feeling at each stage of that process made me feel like we were on the right track. It was nice because we got to try different things.

There are lots of big action sequences in Bodyguard that we probably hadn’t done that many of in Line Of Duty up to that point.

We probably now do more of those as a result of realising we’ve got the resources and the technical skills.

With two big successes, is it a challenge to juggle which comes next? Is Bodyguard 2 written?

Bodyguard is a big beast to put back together. I’m reasonably confident we will see it in due course. With Line Of Duty, again, we don’t know whether season six will be the last.

How did the team manage to complete series six without it looking like a post-Covid show?

The challenge with all the safety protocols when we resumed shooting at the end of August, having had effectively five months off, was to make them invisible.

Line Of Duty is a show that is generally all shot on location in real spaces. There were several we either couldn’t get access to or that weren’t going to be Covid-safe so we built sets in the studios where there was more space for social distancing.

How did you get into TV as a writer and script editor on Byker Grove?

I wanted to be a sports journalist, to write about Birmingham City for the Birmingham Evening Mail, but I couldn’t get on to any journalism courses so I answered a tiny ad in the Guardian which said: ‘Trainee script editor required for Zenith North.’

I wrote with my CV, saying I’d done some acting and writing, and it turned out the company made Byker Grove.

I was fortunate enough to be given the job and, having started as a trainee, six weeks later the script editor unexpectedly left and I was thrown in at the deep end.

Was this at the height of Ant and Dec’s fame as PJ and Duncan?

Yes, it was the series when PJ and Duncan had broken through. We were getting five million viewers at ten past five in the afternoon. It was extraordinary.

It was just a question of learning on the job and building a relationship with Ant and Dec. It then seemed logical to write a show for Ant and Dec.

So I wrote a basic pitch document and we got other writers involved, including David Walliams and Richard Osman, and the BBC eventually commissioned two series.

But I liked the idea of producing, marshalling the team, so I wrote to two people whose shows I admired. One was Tony Garnett [Kes, This Life, Between The Lines] at World Productions. I’ve stayed ever since.

Mistakes – you’ve made a few?

We were doing a show and we had a lead director and knew the style of the show we wanted. For the second director I employed someone newer, a bit left-field, but who was dead smart. I thought he knew what was required.

The first director finished and I needed to focus on those two episodes so I didn’t look at the second director’s first two or three days of rushes – and then I did and I realised he’d gone completely off-beam.

Tony Garnett hit the roof. But we re-shot some of the stuff and he did two good episodes in the end.

Line Of Duty is on BBC1 at 9pm on Sundays and on BBC iPlayer.

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