Line of Duty cast have a 'Season 7' group chat with Jed Mercurio

27 September 2023, 09:00

Martin Compston revealed how series creator Jed Mercurio changed the title of their group chat, but no one has spoken about it since.

Jed Mecurio and the cast of Line of Duty have a WhatsApp group titled 'Line of duty 7'.

The BBC police drama came to a dramatic climax in its sixth and final season, but fans have speculated whether it could possibly make a return for an encore ever since.

Now, it appears the show's creator trolled friends and colleagues from the show -Martin Compston, Vicky McClure and Adrian Dunbar, who played DS Steve Arnott, DC Kate Felming and Superintendent Ted Hastings respectively - by changing the name of the group chat. However, there isn't much to talk about yet...

Asked on the Restless Natives podcast if he would be "reuniting the troops" for a seventh season of the hit show, Mercurio told Gordon Smart: "Well we would love to, but at the moment there’s no news."

Compston, who co-hosts the podcast, explained: "There's absolutely is no immediate plans. Jed’s on strike. We’re all filming different stuff. We’ve got a WhatsApp group that was 'Line of Duty 6' and then a while ago Jed changed the name of it to 'Line of Duty 7'.

“And what I love about it is, we’ve never spoken about it since!"

Catch up on the full episode of Restless Natives

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Mercurio - who is also behind the teams that created Bodyguard, Bloodlands and Trigger Point - may have teased the Line of Duty cast with a title change on their WhatsApp group, but he doesn't enjoy teasing fans.

In fact, the 57-year-old TV writer finds it "frustrating" when stories about a new Line of Duty series are released that aren't true, because it gets the fans' hopes up.

"I think one of the points is that it’s important in terms of stuff getting out into the public domain that we play our cards close to our chest and what we don’t do is tease," he said.

“There are lots of fans of show and we have to respect them and therefore we can only tell them definite things, which is why we get frustrated by stories that just aren’t true appearing in the press, which then get the fans excited and no amount of correction, no amount of saying nothing has been confirmed seems to change that narrative, but when I meet fans I answer honestly. If I meet a genuine fan I tell them the truth."

“We wouldn’t do it for the sake of doing it," added Compston. "That’s the thing. Jed will only write it if there’s a story to tell. […]There is part of you going, let’s walk away on a high, but there is part of you going, well we all want to work together again just because we’re so close. There’s both sides to it.

“We wouldn’t do it just for the sake of it. It would have to add to the series. We’d have to make it better.”

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