Charlie covell age

14 December 2023

What inspired you to create this show?

 Iain and I had a coffee about ten or eleven years ago, after a pitch I think, and I mentioned an elderly family member who’d rather forcefully told us that she’d rather we “take [her] out the back and shoot [her]” were she ever to become terminally ill.  It had been a joke — kind of.

But the idea of fading away in agony and/ or confusion appalled and terrified her. So Iain and I ended up talking about mercy killing and assisted dying as an idea for a drama. Asking someone to promise that.

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Someone promising. And then having to actually keep the promise, when the time came.  Could one do it? Should one do it? We wanted to ask the questions but not provide answers. Not moralise, just explore the emotional and psychological landscape of that story.

I don’t think you can be didactic about this kind of thing. And I think in that meeting we came up with the beginnings of Phil and Ken. We loved the idea of