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Where did the idea for Exile come from?

Trying to do something different with a mini series – it's potentially a sentimental story; it could have gone that way – but it didn't. It came from just building a story.

I had a raging confrontation that I wanted to have with somebody which (I now personally know) there was no value to confront. But I don't know what to do with the rage. Intellectually I know it would do no good. I sat there wondering how to deal with it and so eventually you do go back to confront the problem, and you can't not expect a volcano when everything has been neutralised for so long – and that's where Exile started from.

In the opening of Exile, John Simm's character has a huge explosion and fall out at work and that propels him to go and see his dad.

Forced out of his job, he goes home, where no one can find him; as home is the one place he's never discussed with his mates because he pretended he didn't belong in his past, and no-one knows that side of him. So he ends up going to the one place he most needs to escape from – home: because it's the only refuge available.

Do you have experience of Alzheimer's in your life?

My grandma had Alzheimer's. I didn't really know her but I used to go and visit when I was on Coronation Street. I remember driving to Corrie listening to Radio Lancashire and there was a news bulletin which said two pensioners had caused a riot in a working men's club in Burnley – that was my gran, Lilly Law, and they were both 88!

It is desperate that people can get to that bit in their memory that is only clear fleetingly, that they won't remember again until something happens to trigger it.

I'd get bored when I visited my grandma; it was quite cruel really but I knew something would trigger her memory so I would almost write both sides of the conversation, to get a full conversation out of her. I had the script in my head because I would know what would be coming. Working out what her memory triggers were was mischievous of me, but it kept her talking, so it was therapeutic for her.

What is at the heart of the drama in your eyes?

I used to have teacher at school who said "Blame is for God and very small children". I was about eight and he actually wrote it on the board and I've never forgotten it. That was a starting point for me. You watch a lot of people do a lot of damage with blame with families – that pattern backfires.

Have you worked with any of the cast before?

John Simm yes. We've worked together a lot and people say "He looks/walks like you"!

John will be in our top five rank of actors until the day he dies. He doesn't seem to win awards because people don't realise that what he does is so good: that what he does is invisible. You look at his work and it's extraordinary.

Jim Broadbent I've wanted to work with. For me, the truth is when you meet actors, and since I've met Jim properly at the read-through for Exile I now know how to write for him – and I'm now dying to write for Jim.

I always look at how an actor's mouth moves – and then I know how to write for him. Jim is always brilliant, but once you've actually met an actor and seen how they process their own voice you know how to turn it into something else.

You and Danny have worked together in the past.

We've worked together in the past and Danny was a really good choice for Exile.

The first time I ever met Danny he was a journalist on Manchester's City Life and he was the TV/theatre correspondent. He came along to interview me. He was polite enough not to mention that he had a script because that could be really cheesy for a journalist to do that. So I went "please send me a script". And he did and it was really good.

I put him up for a job on Clocking Off and mentored him through that and Linda Green – and then he was flying on his own from there. He joined the first team of writers on Shameless and has worked on his own projects since then.

This is our first time of working together since Shameless.