Where did the original idea for the story come from? Where did the original idea for the story come from?

I was in court at the time and I was writing a closing speech. I had a very bright and enthusiastic client, who was giving me ideas about what to put in the speech, what he wanted to be covered. And so I was sitting there writing it, and translating what he was saying into what I would say, because we couldn't do it the way he wanted, and he was obviously conscious of that. And so as I was writing it, I thought, what if a defendant had to give his own speech? How would it be different? What would it sound like? What would be the things that he concentrated on compared to the things I would find important?

When I do a speech I try and blend a number of different things. I'm trying to blend a logical argument, an ethical one, and a moral one. I'm trying to do all of that together, and I'll try and concentrate on one more than the other. But if you're a defendant giving a speech on your own account, you probably want to concentrate on other things. And I thought for him, he would probably want to concentrate on the things which were to do with him, the personal things that led him to the situation that he found himself in. He would say, take a walk in my shoes and walk with me a mile and you'll see why I found myself in this situation. That's why I've got a gun in my drawer and you won't understand that answer unless you travel with me for a lot longer than you could in an ordinary speech.

How did you research his story? What made you think this is the character I'm going to choose?

Hero was in an alloy of all of the defendants and clients I have met over the years, and they all kind of share similar features. Hero is a man, a young man, who is from fairly deprived circumstances; he's undereducated, he is lacking in all of the privileges that a lot of other people might find access to. So not only is he in the grip of that underprivilege but he's also got his own personal circumstances going on.

When I was writing Hero, I was drawing from all of those stories that I had heard across the years to find what the common themes are. And that's why in the book, Hero is unnamed. He doesn't have a name, no one knows his name. And so we call him Hero in the show because we have to for the purposes of TV, to identify him. But he's really an everyman to that extent.

How did your background in the legal profession influence your take on his court case?

I've been in the job for coming up to 30 years. So every bit of evidence that I have found interesting, every circumstance I've found interesting is kind of stitched into my consciousness / subconsciousness, it informs every scene. Would I be able to identify which particular case a particular idea came from? Almost certainly not, but it informs every scene, whether it's an interaction where a lawyer is saying something or evidence is being portrayed in a particular way.

How did it feel to see that then translated to screen? What you were trepidations about somebody else taking on your vision, the thing that you had created?

We were so lucky to Tom Edge associated with it, because he's not just an ordinary screenwriter at the height of his game, at the height of his powers. As far as I can tell he's had his head and shoulders above almost everyone in the industry. So whatever trepidation there might have been was fairly quickly extinguished by that knowledge.

And then I had a chance to look at the scripts as he was writing them. I had always known that the TV was going to be a different proposition from the novel because that they're doing different things and in the novel, we have a lot of time to explore the social issues layer by layer. We can deal with characters in a different way, in a much more considered way. In TV we're doing something else, where entertainment is front and centre and everything else is there to enhance the experience.

So yes, I was very comfortable with the fact that they were going to do different things. And of course, once you hand over the novel to somebody who knows what they're doing, you've got to trust their judgement because they're the experts in the field. In much the same way, if somebody comes to me and asks my advice on something legal, they trust what I'm going to tell them.

You mentioned that Tom let you see what he's writing, how much interaction was there between the two of you in terms of building the structure of the story?

Not loads, but whenever he wanted my input about particular a scene, if we were dealing with something court-based he might say, we've got to put this particular argument across, what's the best way of phrasing it? Then I might help him with that. In terms of translating the story into his vision, that was all him. It was all Tom, doing what he does best.

Tell us about Kyra and what role she plays in the story.

The story is ultimately and fundamentally a love story, and what we will do for love and how strong a force love is, particularly in the lives of people who don't have that much else. As a kind of propulsive force, love becomes so important and it's so binding in communities where there is so much deprivation. It's at the heart of the relationships.

Hero is a man who has always described himself as somebody who has fought hard to stay away from the gangs and the drugs and all the things that can pull a man deep into that darkness. And Kyra, for him, was the conduit through which he could achieve that, because she was always the light at the end of that tunnel. And so when he was labouring towards that goal, it was her that he was seeing in his mind's eye.

Kyra herself, she's not just a muse in that sense. She represents love in the story, she's that force of nature. But she's very much her own person, she represents a different kind of unfortunate circumstance in the lives of people like her. You've got this woman who is brilliant and bright, highly literate and quite academic and has this love for reading, which informs her every move and it's kind of deep in her. And yet, she's marginalised because of our circumstances.

There's another interesting love in the show that we see and that's between Hero and his sister, Bless. Can you give us an insight into that relationship?

I wanted to have all those big relationships representing different aspects of love. So you have a Hero and his mother, a very strong relationship imbued with love, but different from the one with Kyra. Hero and Bless also very different. Bless for me is the moral centre of Hero. She is his compass to guide him. They've grown up together. They've developed this spirit of brotherhood, sisterhood, friendship, and love as they've been walking their paths and they know right from wrong as a reflection of each other.

The story could easily be regarded as a comment on British society and particularly the situation of young black people in Britain. Did you try to avoid that cliché when you were writing the book, or did you actually say something that was wider than the story itself?

Definitely. It's one of the frustrations I found working in the criminal justice system. You hear the statistics and it's hard to make sense of them because they're so wild in a way. There are a disproportionate number of young black people and young black men in the criminal justice system. We say criminal justice system, but what we really mean is 'accused of a crime and convicted'. And yet we can dress it up as a justice system as if we're kind of achieving some high moral aim. But what we're talking about is criminality - and so why are they there? and it always offended me.

It's not the young lads from Mayfair who find themselves in the dock of Kingston Crown Court. It's the people with nothing. And you know what we're really saying when we're criminalising them is, this is your fault that you were in this situation. But of course it's not. It's not a situation of their making. What we do is we strip them of every advantage and then we complain when as a result of that lack of anything, the lack of any kind of solid structure that they fall through the cracks. I mean, it's not a surprise. In fact, it's inevitable that they should do that. But what I found, frankly, truly offensive was that we were designing a system which was aimed at criminalising a condition that as a society we created for them. I mean, I'm still slightly heartbroken that this happens again and again and again.

How much of a light do you think that this show will shine on that, and do you think it could affect change?

Well, I think the war, if we can describe it like that, is a war of attrition. Of course, I'm not going to make any change, but it might as a grain of sand in the scales. And as long as there are other grains of sand going in the scales, from all directions, from the political classes, from the academic classes, from the arts, from all kinds of areas of culture, as long as that keeps happening and the swell of movement and that pressure keeps up, then hopefully it will. I think change is inevitable. I think the difference is coming. It's just the question of when, it's probably not soon enough.

You've managed to capture the voice of the young black people in Britain today. How did you and Tom approach it? How much research goes into that?

I think young people develop their own language as they should! It's not confined to young black people, but young people, across the country, white, black, Asian speak in this way. It's beautiful if you listen to it, and it's lyrical and I've just always been attuned to that whenever I've heard it. In the novel, some of the words were invented by me because the language becomes dated very quickly if you use current slang. And as for Tom, he involved the cast and we engaged young people as consultants and they said it was pretty much bang on. But they might have been having a laugh at our expense. Who knows?

I was in court at the time and I was writing a closing speech. I had a very bright and enthusiastic client, who was giving me ideas about what to put in the speech, what he wanted to be covered. And so I was sitting there writing it, and translating what he was saying into what I would say, because we couldn't do it the way he wanted, and he was obviously conscious of that. And so as I was writing it, I thought, what if a defendant had to give his own speech? How would it be different? What would it sound like? What would be the things that he concentrated on compared to the things I would find important?

When I do a speech I try and blend a number of different things. I'm trying to blend a logical argument, an ethical one, and a moral one. I'm trying to do all of that together, and I'll try and concentrate on one more than the other. But if you're a defendant giving a speech on your own account, you probably want to concentrate on other things. And I thought for him, he would probably want to concentrate on the things which were to do with him, the personal things that led him to the situation that he found himself in. He would say, take a walk in my shoes and walk with me a mile and you'll see why I found myself in this situation. That's why I've got a gun in my drawer and you won't understand that answer unless you travel with me for a lot longer than you could in an ordinary speech.

How did you research his story? What made you think this is the character I'm going to choose?

Hero was in an alloy of all of the defendants and clients I have met over the years, and they all kind of share similar features. Hero is a man, a young man, who is from fairly deprived circumstances; he's undereducated, he is lacking in all of the privileges that a lot of other people might find access to. So not only is he in the grip of that underprivilege but he's also got his own personal circumstances going on.

When I was writing Hero, I was drawing from all of those stories that I had heard across the years to find what the common themes are. And that's why in the book, Hero is unnamed. He doesn't have a name, no one knows his name. And so we call him Hero in the show because we have to for the purposes of TV, to identify him. But he's really an everyman to that extent.

How did your background in the legal profession influence your take on his court case?

I've been in the job for coming up to 30 years. So every bit of evidence that I have found interesting, every circumstance I've found interesting is kind of stitched into my consciousness / subconsciousness, it informs every scene. Would I be able to identify which particular case a particular idea came from? Almost certainly not, but it informs every scene, whether it's an interaction where a lawyer is saying something or evidence is being portrayed in a particular way.

How did it feel to see that then translated to screen? What you were trepidations about somebody else taking on your vision, the thing that you had created?

We were so lucky to Tom Edge associated with it, because he's not just an ordinary screenwriter at the height of his game, at the height of his powers. As far as I can tell he's had his head and shoulders above almost everyone in the industry. So whatever trepidation there might have been was fairly quickly extinguished by that knowledge.

And then I had a chance to look at the scripts as he was writing them. I had always known that the TV was going to be a different proposition from the novel because that they're doing different things and in the novel, we have a lot of time to explore the social issues layer by layer. We can deal with characters in a different way, in a much more considered way. In TV we're doing something else, where entertainment is front and centre and everything else is there to enhance the experience.

So yes, I was very comfortable with the fact that they were going to do different things. And of course, once you hand over the novel to somebody who knows what they're doing, you've got to trust their judgement because they're the experts in the field. In much the same way, if somebody comes to me and asks my advice on something legal, they trust what I'm going to tell them.

You mentioned that Tom let you see what he's writing, how much interaction was there between the two of you in terms of building the structure of the story?

Not loads, but whenever he wanted my input about particular a scene, if we were dealing with something court-based he might say, we've got to put this particular argument across, what's the best way of phrasing it? Then I might help him with that. In terms of translating the story into his vision, that was all him. It was all Tom, doing what he does best.

Tell us about Kyra and what role she plays in the story.

The story is ultimately and fundamentally a love story, and what we will do for love and how strong a force love is, particularly in the lives of people who don't have that much else. As a kind of propulsive force, love becomes so important and it's so binding in communities where there is so much deprivation. It's at the heart of the relationships.

Hero is a man who has always described himself as somebody who has fought hard to stay away from the gangs and the drugs and all the things that can pull a man deep into that darkness. And Kyra, for him, was the conduit through which he could achieve that, because she was always the light at the end of that tunnel. And so when he was labouring towards that goal, it was her that he was seeing in his mind's eye.

Kyra herself, she's not just a muse in that sense. She represents love in the story, she's that force of nature. But she's very much her own person, she represents a different kind of unfortunate circumstance in the lives of people like her. You've got this woman who is brilliant and bright, highly literate and quite academic and has this love for reading, which informs her every move and it's kind of deep in her. And yet, she's marginalised because of our circumstances.

There's another interesting love in the show that we see and that's between Hero and his sister, Bless. Can you give us an insight into that relationship?

I wanted to have all those big relationships representing different aspects of love. So you have a Hero and his mother, a very strong relationship imbued with love, but different from the one with Kyra. Hero and Bless also very different. Bless for me is the moral centre of Hero. She is his compass to guide him. They've grown up together. They've developed this spirit of brotherhood, sisterhood, friendship, and love as they've been walking their paths and they know right from wrong as a reflection of each other.

The story could easily be regarded as a comment on British society and particularly the situation of young black people in Britain. Did you try to avoid that cliché when you were writing the book, or did you actually say something that was wider than the story itself?

Definitely. It's one of the frustrations I found working in the criminal justice system. You hear the statistics and it's hard to make sense of them because they're so wild in a way. There are a disproportionate number of young black people and young black men in the criminal justice system. We say criminal justice system, but what we really mean is 'accused of a crime and convicted'. And yet we can dress it up as a justice system as if we're kind of achieving some high moral aim. But what we're talking about is criminality - and so why are they there? and it always offended me.

It's not the young lads from Mayfair who find themselves in the dock of Kingston Crown Court. It's the people with nothing. And you know what we're really saying when we're criminalising them is, this is your fault that you were in this situation. But of course it's not. It's not a situation of their making. What we do is we strip them of every advantage and then we complain when as a result of that lack of anything, the lack of any kind of solid structure that they fall through the cracks. I mean, it's not a surprise. In fact, it's inevitable that they should do that. But what I found, frankly, truly offensive was that we were designing a system which was aimed at criminalising a condition that as a society we created for them. I mean, I'm still slightly heartbroken that this happens again and again and again.

How much of a light do you think that this show will shine on that, and do you think it could affect change?

Well, I think the war, if we can describe it like that, is a war of attrition. Of course, I'm not going to make any change, but it might as a grain of sand in the scales. And as long as there are other grains of sand going in the scales, from all directions, from the political classes, from the academic classes, from the arts, from all kinds of areas of culture, as long as that keeps happening and the swell of movement and that pressure keeps up, then hopefully it will. I think change is inevitable. I think the difference is coming. It's just the question of when, it's probably not soon enough.

You've managed to capture the voice of the young black people in Britain today. How did you and Tom approach it? How much research goes into that?

I think young people develop their own language as they should! It's not confined to young black people, but young people, across the country, white, black, Asian speak in this way. It's beautiful if you listen to it, and it's lyrical and I've just always been attuned to that whenever I've heard it. In the novel, some of the words were invented by me because the language becomes dated very quickly if you use current slang. And as for Tom, he involved the cast and we engaged young people as consultants and they said it was pretty much bang on. But they might have been having a laugh at our expense. Who knows?