ELEVENTH HOUR FOR ITV WINTER SEASON
This new series of contemporary science thrillers has been scheduled to air on Thursday nights beginning January 19th, 2006.
“It’s great that people are finally going to get to see the show and find out exactly what it’s about… and that all the stuff about it being ‘ITV’s answer to Dr Who’ can finally be kicked into touch.
“ELEVENTH HOUR is a series of post-watershed thrillers about headline science.
“It started with a challenge from Sir Paul Nurse. At the time he was the research director of Cancer UK, and we’d been involved in a Wellcome-sponsored debate about the depiction of science in drama.
“They’d screened some clips from my TV adaptation of CHIMERA, which was basically a retelling of the Frankenstein myth in the context of near-future genetic engineering. We spent some time in the bar afterwards and later, as we parted, he suggested that maybe next time I could consider some of the story possibilities in the real science of today.
“The more I thought about it, the bigger a challenge I realised it was. I’m an Arts graduate, for a start. When Arts types take on science, they - we - almost invariably default to a form of science fiction without even realising it.
“Science can be done for TV, and done grippingly and well – Stephen Poliakoff’s superb STRONGER THAN THE SUN, for example. But for every one of those you’ll find a dozen misfires with a level of actual-case awareness that wouldn’t be tolerated in a police, medical or legal drama. Everything in science is theoretical, they seem to be saying, so who’s to say that I can’t put up any theory I want?
“So the first step in creating ELEVENTH HOUR was to learn to distinguish between the tenable and the preposterous. Find experts you trust, and try your ideas out on them. And when they point out the flaws in your assumptions, you damn well pay attention – because you just reached the real start of your journey.
“It’s a fact-based science/suspense show. The characters are an emeritus physics professor and his Special Branch minder, whose job is to get to a science-based crisis-in-the-making ahead of the politicians. Because let’s face it, when politicians get involved the crisis always escalates. They faffed and dissembled about BSE, and then they wondered why no-one would believe their assurances over MMR.
“Science isn’t our villain. Human fallibility is.
“I can understand how it happened. Right in the middle of last summer’s DR WHO fever, journalists in search of an angle looked at Patrick’s background and mine and drew a quick conclusion.
“But it’s not DR WHO. It’s not even Doomwatch. It’s what it is.”
The first feature-length ELEVENTH HOUR film, Man Without a Shadow, has been scheduled for transmission on ITV1 on January 19th, 2006. The Sentinel Case follows one week later.