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When the call came through that had been recommissioned for a second series, it was met with the usual combination of unbridled excitement and paralysing terror: the joy that we would get the opportunity to revisit Roarton and its myriad of fantastic characters again, coupled with the realisation that we now only had a few months to storyline and write six hours of drama. We were all dead excited and dead proud (pun intended) to have worked on Series 1, now Series 2 would need us to redouble our efforts, in every sense.

The world, characters and tone created by Dominic Mitchell in Series 1 are utterly unique and original. The first three episodes told a neat three-hour story with a beginning, a middle and an end, but we knew Series 2 would need to be a different beast: and a beast that would need feeding with a lot more story. With that in mind, we immediately set about widening out the world of Roarton, introducing new characters and new locations, while still centering everything around Kieren Walker and the trials and tribulations of being a Partially Deceased Syndrome sufferer in such a narrow-minded cauldron of a home town.

Fortunately Dom already had lots of characters and ideas in his head, so we built on those and set about creating the two major new character additions for Series 2: and . Dom’s maxim for the series has always been to ask the question ‘what would actually happen if this was real?’, and one of the key answers to this was, we felt, that it would push people to extremes. Maxine and Simon are the embodiment of these extremes, at opposite ends of the spectrum – Maxine as an MP for Victus, the anti-PDS ‘Pro Living Party’ and Simon as a disciple of the Undead Prophet, head of the Undead Liberation Army. Our hero, Kieren, sits rather nicely in the middle. Once we had our characters, we started storylining: character arcs, serial arcs and episodic stories. Series 2 is still very serial-led in its storytelling, but we were also conscious to shine the spotlight brighter on one key character per episode- for example Jem's PTSD story in Episode 2 – while still knitting these stories into the wider serial arcs too. We're big fans of storylining on a white board on In the Flesh. Beat by beat on the board, then a few drafts of a scene by scene written up, and then go to script. Obviously things still change at script stage, but having firm foundations is key and will always save you time further down the line.

One of the hardest things to get right on In the Flesh is the tone. Obviously it’s a high concept idea, but the realisation of it is completely low concept – kitchen-sink zombies, if you like. The temptation sometimes is to go ‘big’ and we constantly have to reign ourselves in and keep things channeled through the little village of Roarton (a microcosm of our wider world) and, further still, through the Walker Family house. This doesn’t mean we don’t grapple ‘big’ issues, just that that are filtered through grounded and recognisable characters. Again, to return to Dom’s maxim: ‘What would actually happen?’

We’ve been fortunate to win two BAFTAs for series one – Best Writer and Best Mini-Series; with the incredibly talented Luke Newberry nominated for Best Lead Actor too. It's been such great fun working on In the Flesh (as Luke himself said to the press after our BAFTA win, we're like one big Zombie family) and we’re keeping our rigor-mortis ridden fingers crossed that our luck continues and, rather like the Undead, we'll be returning again for series three in 2015. Surely that’s a no-brainer?

is the creator and writer of In The Flesh.

In the Flesh was discovered by ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Drama North through ‘Northern Voices’, a ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ writersroom scheme. Dominic was one of four writers who was selected and received training and script development – his intriguing script took a unique angle on the zombie genre and as a result was developed, commissioned and produced by ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Drama North.

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