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…came about at the end of a three hour murder mystery.

It was about a nanny who had murdered two children in her care, and had eventually been tracked down and brought to book. She had lied and deceived, and wept, and seduced, and distorted, and it seemed like she was innocent, or that she was going to get away with it over and over again.

In the end she had been found guilty, and sentenced to umpteen years in prison for the murder of the two young children in her care.

Myself as writer, the script editor, the producer, the researcher, the Exec Producer, the guy in accounts, the courier who had dropped in and out of the office, we’d all been discussing how the script should end for months. We could not get it right.

We knew the girl was going to be in prison, but we just couldn’t get to the thought at the very end of the show, the idea the audience were going to take away with them.

We had tried what seemed like a million different endings: she denied it to her cell mate and protested her innocence to the last, she laughed about the murders, admitted her guilt finally, she wept for her own lost chances now she was inside, she’d been chirpy and happy and psychotically untouched by the whole thing.

All of those were fine for different reasons - and none of them really did it.

By which I mean none of those endings really gave the audience one last kick, one last injection of the Wow factor.

We widened our scope. We tried different images. For a while we ended on the families who had suffered the loss. We even tried going out by lingering on the tombstone of the murdered baby.

Nah. All cosy, predictable. Functional, of course, but unsurprising.

In the end it was the director, Tristram Powell, who gave us the thing, very close to him actually beginning the shoot.

He suggested a single line of dialogue that, when I heard it, made me shiver.

He wanted the murdering nanny to turn to her cell mate, and say words to the effect of:

‘When I have my babies I’m going to look after them properly.’

To my mind that is a simply STUNNING line.

As with all great lines of dialogue it’s to do with the pure compression of the huge thought behind it.

In this one sentence, at the last possible minute of the script, Tristram had opened a door through to a deep, dark evil at the heart of the nanny that none of us had ever suspected before.

First of all, the line paid off in a flash the debate that had run through the script about whether mothers should work and hire a nanny, or stay at home to look after their children. It showed that this murderer blamed the mothers of the dead children for hiring a nanny in the first place. It showed a MONSTROUS denial from her about what she had done, a total lack of repentance, which I still find utterly chilling.

And in the second place, well, the nanny was young.

Of COURSE she was going to get out of prison at some point.

And OF COURSE she was going to have her own children.

And those children were going to love her, and she would be able to love them, which is more than the mothers in the story would ever be able to do because of her. This on its own seemed monstrously unfair.

But of course there is the suggestion, you can’t get away from it, that even, maybe, at some point, her psychosis was going to surface again, and she was going to murder more children – her own children - too.

So while she faced 15 years or more in prison, all closure was just blown apart, and the script ended with what felt to me like the detonation of a bomb.

Like I said, the best line of dialogue I never wrote.