Despite the multimillion pound budgets, the endless focus groups, and the carefully thought-out plans that characterise British broadcasting, the best moments in TV are often the result of a frantic botch job. When Spooks went on air in May 2002, its mix of carefully plotted espionage, cinematic techniques and pacey action grabbed a healthy 40% share. But the following week, it hit the headlines for a different reason. Holby City star Lisa Faulkner was pretty much the only big name in the cast and halfway through that evening's episode she had her head thrust into a boiling fat fryer before being shot.
The effect was spectacular: 334 viewers complained. Messageboards all over the BBC website continued to buzz even two weeks after the event. Some people thought Faulkner would return from the dead. Others suspected she had a twin sister. What seemed to have shocked them was not the brutality of the death - not especially graphic in the normal run of TV drama - but that Spooks did what television almost never does. It killed off one of its leads in the second episode of a long-running series. And in mainstream TV you just do not do that.
Jane Featherstone, joint managing director of Spooks production company Kudos, laughs and looks a tiny bit guilty. "The Lisa thing actually came about because David Wolstencroft was writing the outline for episode two and we just couldn't get it right," she admits. "We really needed the series to get the green light and the strongest story we had was in episode 13, where a woman got her head set on fire. We'd seen Lisa but we weren't sure we were going to cast her, the best story we had was the climax, we needed the commission, so what were we going to do? I said, let's move the most dramatic thing you've got to episode two and kill off the only actress the audience recognise and then you've got them hooked. We hoped ..."
And they were hooked, which was lucky for Kudos and lucky for Featherstone. When she joined the company in 2000 as a bright-eyed head of drama with a few decent shows under her belt - producer of Touching Evil and Glasgow Kiss - Kudos might have seemed something of a misnomer. Channel 4 had just decided not to recommission its flagship drama Psychos, and the feature film Among Giants (from the pen of The Full Monty scribe Simon Beaufoy) had performed about as well as most British movies.
Hustle and bustle
Five years later, Featherstone sits in her Islington office with the fifth series of Spooks and the fourth of Hustle about to begin production (so successful was Spooks that she got Hustle greenlighted before she had finished the first sentence of the pitch). She is also in pre-production for Life On Mars, starring John Simm as a 2006 new man police officer who gets hit by a car and wakes up in 1973 working as a copper in a Sweeney-style nick. And last week she picked up a commission for a new six-part Sally Wainwright drama called The Amazing Mrs Pritchard - in which a down-to-earth supermarket manager accidentally becomes prime minister. Clearly it has all gone right. But she could not have known it would. Why did she take such a high-risk job?
"It may sound terribly Machiavellian, but I'd been round lots of indies at the time and most of them already had a very strong drama identity so I would have been part of the team, which was fine, but I felt with Kudos there was something to do, something to create," she says, adding with a laugh, "And I didn't know any better. I was 29. I didn't know it was a risk. I didn't know the economics of the business. I didn't know that if we hadn't got the Spooks commission within six months of me being here, the company might not have made it. Ignorance is bliss."
Spooks, like many of Kudos' projects, was something the company had stuck with in the face of broadcaster indifference. The show was developed for C4 in a completely different form as a Teachers-style drama focusing on the personal lives of spies with little to do in a post-IRA era, turning up to work drunk and shagging in cupboards. A change of broadcaster personnel and political climate made them dust the script off and give it a new angle. Even Life On Mars was originally devised six years ago for Peter Salmon at the BBC. And when Featherstone talks about these projects, it is always the writer she namechecks first.
"What annoys me about the way people talk about British drama versus American drama is how they keep downplaying British writing talent," she says, nodding earnestly. "When you're trying to encourage talent to work on series - which is, I think, largely where the future of television will be in drama - I want them to feel they are part of something special and not always second fiddle to the Americans. Our writers come through a different route. Drama series are the heart of US network television, whereas our writers tend to come from soaps or theatre. The culture of a long-running 10-part show like Spooks is unusual for them, but the raw talent is equal to anything on the other side of the Atlantic."
According to Jane Tranter, controller of drama commissioning at the BBC, one of Featherstone's great skills is keeping the writing talent happy. "Jane is unusual in the drama industry in that she's got good taste - which is not unusual - but she combines that with a very detailed ability to work with writers," she says. "She's brilliant with them, everybody likes her, she can leave her ego at the door, but when she makes a suggestion it's usually right and the writers listen to what she's saying."
Although a love of writing is perhaps to be expected in a woman whose sister is artistic director of the National Theatre of Scotland and who has spent time running an experimental theatre company called Brouhaha, her diplomatic skills - perhaps uniquely in television management - owe much to Paul Gascoigne. On graduating from Leeds with a degree in history she had a burning desire to work in television. However, the careers office said there was no point trying if her parents did not work in the industry and the first job she got was as Gazza's PA.
'A great diplomat'
"One of my college friends was working in the Spurs press office and got to know his lawyer Mel Stein," she explains. "She knew I loved football so rang me up and said they were looking for a PA. He'd just had his accident in the FA Cup final where he'd done his anterior cruciate ligament in," she smiles proudly, "and there's not many people with a history degree can say that phrase with ease. So I tottered along, Stein was an hour and a half late, the interview took five minutes and I started the next Monday."
There are plenty of stories she will not tell a journalist about her 18 months with the footballer - "because a lot of them have to do with my tits" - but covering for him as he turned up late meant she spent a lot of time keeping the temperamental star and everyone who was waiting for him happy. "You learn to be a great diplomat," she says, "And that is what working with writers and actors and commissioning editors is like. It's about juggling high-end personalities."
The journey from Gazza to Kudos took determination and drive, but now Featherstone is there, her ambition has not exactly dried up: she wants to change the face of British television drama permanently. "We are going to have to start producing longer-running series," she says. "We are going to have to start the shift to US-style 26-part series. The audience are ready for it, and to have C4 without drama at the heart of its schedule can't go on."
"Look, the price per hour is going down," she says. "The average price for drama is £6-800,000 per hour in the UK, whilst Lost is £3m and smaller US dramas are £1.2m. We try as hard as we can to put the money on the screen and make it look expensive but we can't afford to pay our actors, writers or directors as much as they'd get paid in America, which means they're less likely to hang around. And the best way to get more money is to sell to America. Without US sales, Spooks and Hustle probably break even. If you get an American sale it tips you into profit immediately."
It's a bold battle cry, although it defies conventional TV wisdom - which says the Yanks only buy our flannel 'n' frocks drama while we prefer Helen Mirren two-part specials. But then, if you are prepared to kill your only star in episode two, the conventional route is clearly not the one you tend to choose.
Curriculum vitae
Age 36
Education
1987-91 History and German, Leeds University
Career
2004 Joint managing director, Kudos
2000 Head of drama, Kudos
1995-2000 Producer, mainly with Hat Trick
1994-95 Line producer, Drop The Dead Donkey
1993-94 Production assistant, Hat Trick. Worked on Have I Got News For You? and Whose Line Is It Anyway?
1991-93 PA, Paul Gascoigne