If Pulse does get the go ahead, how long will it take to gear up for a full-length series? So, in this case, I think we’ll be looking at transmitting in late March or early April of 2011. And everyone involved in the pilot has signed up to do the series? Do you see beyond that first series? Is there a wider story arc planned? Yes, we’ve already talked about what the second series will bring. I think most series have behind them a big governing idea, and once you’ve got that, then you work out the arcs next. The important thing is to have the big idea for the series, which we have for the first series [of Pulse] and we have an idea for the second. So, when people ask me for detail within that, often I can say “I don’t know.” But that’s half the fun when you’re given the chance to make a show, where you get to mould the detail within the overall series. Whose idea was it to preview Pulse on the BBC website? That was a conversation we had with the BBC. The thing with BBC3 is, they’re really forward thinking, and they can see the advantages of it. A pilot is a showcase. It’s not really about how many people sit down at 9 o’clock on Thursday 3 of June to see the show, it’s about how many people cumulatively see it, both on the website, on the original transmission and on the repeat transmissions that follow over the fortnight. Then there’s that rather vague term, ‘word of mouth’, which builds up around it, and receives a more concrete representation now, thanks to the Internet. So, why did you decide to create a pilot rather than go for a full series? The riskier the idea, the more everyone wants to test that idea out. In America, of course, the problem has been the huge, huge amount of resources that have been wasted on pilots. Because there have been so many, and they spend a lot of money on them as well. I mean, we made [Pulse] relatively cheaply. It is a bit. It’s a little disappointing. I know a friend of mine is directing something for AMC at the moment, which is an eight part series, and there was no pilot, and that’ll probably be it, just those eight episodes. I mean, if you have a season of pilots in America, which are predominantly relationship dramas, and half of them are hopeless, everybody goes running back to genre shows the following year, and vice versa. So, I think you can have this real oscillation between the two. I think you always have to develop things as though it’s going straight to series, because the real danger is having a pilot and not having an idea of how it would work as a series. I’m not talking about the detail, where, say, in episode two this character is going to have a relationship with that character, but you need to be able to say, “This is how the pilot works,” and know how the nuts and bolts all fit together. I think it goes back to the fact that pilots for drama are quite rare in the UK. We’re used to seeing comedy pilots left, right and centre. Do you feel it’s just the BBC that’s pushing for this kind of drama? Do you have an eye on an international audience for Pulse as well? Yes, potentially. I’m sure [America] would want to make their own version, but that’s what we do. We made Ultraviolet about twelve years ago, and there’s been at least one or maybe two pilots made of that, but it never clicked somehow. In fact, the first pilot starred Idris Elba, and that’s how he starred in The Wire, because his work was seen by HBO. The Pulse pilot premieres on BBC3 at 9pm tonight. You can read our interview with screenwriter Paul Cornell here.
