The Iris Affair writer reveals how Sky changed a crucial element of the series from "lazy" original concept

As we jump back in time on multiple occasions across the earlier episodes, we learn that Iris was recruited by Cameron to wake up a powerful machine. However, when she learned how it might impact the future of humanity, she stole a journal containing its activation codes and left it dormant.

Now, speaking with us for our video interview series The Radio Times Writers' Room, in which we get to know what makes screenwriters tick, Cross has revealed that using dual timelines wasn't actually an original part of his concept for the show.

"It wasn't what I set out to do, and it was a kind of shape that found itself in the editorial process, first of all," Cross explained. "My initial idea was to just do a flashback episode, episode 4. And after the show was commissioned, kind of editorially Sky thought that might be a bit lazy.

"And it's like, 'There might be elements of the story that we need to know up front.' And I'm like, 'Well, I don't want to have people sitting down talking to each other about the magic machine in Slovenia. So we're going to have to have, now and again, a kind of dual timeline.'"

"I didn't find it hard," Cross explained, "because at any given moment a story is a kind of exploded diagram in my head. And like some people could do with engines, I can move bits around, and I can rotate bits through 90 degrees. So keeping track of that was easy. What wasn't, is I did lose track of certain things that the audience did need to know about the present day."

He continued: "So, in Act One of episode 1, we go to Rome and we meet this group of corrupt coppers led by Bruni. I didn't know those characters existed until I wrote episode 5. So we had to go back and plug them into episode 1, and that, in fact, was the last scene we shot. I'm a very disorganised writer!

"But it's like a little bit of Lego, and the nice thing about it is that by the time I wrote that scene, I'd written the whole of the story of Bruni and his crew. So I knew the actors, I knew the characters. So when we do meet them in that scene in Rome, in episode 1, they're fully fleshed out."

Elsewhere in his conversation for The Radio Times Writers' Room, Cross spoke about his work on Spooks, Hard Sun, Doctor Who and, of course, Luther.

On the subject of the latter series, Cross teased that a sequel film to 2023's The Fallen Sun could well be on the way, saying: "There are extraordinarily strong possibilities you might see him again.

"Is that the heaviest hint that’s possible to give without Netflix sending a trained assassin around to silence me? Yeah, there's every chance you will meet him again."

Neil Cross's interview for The Radio Times Writers' Room will be available to watch in full on Thursday 16th October.

The Iris Affair will launch on Sky and NOW on Thursday 16th October. Find out more about how to sign up for Sky TV.

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