Blunt force trauma.  There’s something great sounding about that expression.  Something authoritative.  It’s an expression you could easily put into the mouth of a pathologist character if you’ve got a dead body in a scene and need to explain to a listening cop, and the audience, how they got that way.

I collect phrases like those.  Got a little black book full of them.  I dip into it from time to time when I want to stir up the contents of my head, introduce a random element from a newspaper quote, snippet of overheard conversation, or whatever else ends up in there.  Today, I came across a coinage that had to be included in that book: the sequence ’swine flu party’.

Now, an actual swine flu party is about exposing your child to swine flu now, in the summer, so that they can be treated for the condition while the NHS is up to the task, so the theory goes.  The other part being that things will be worse by the winter, when Gordon Brown has bled the NHS off anything other than sticking plasters.  This is Daily Mail logic we’re talking: that paper may well the source of the phrase.

It’s one that’s had quite a hold on my imagination today.  I went for a very welcome swim in the afternoon, the just-chill water a beautiful contrast to the heat outside, which reduced me and everything else to the state of melted plasticine.  And as I swam, the phrase came back to me unbidden, and with it the seed of an idea.

Swine flu party.  What sort of parents send their kids to a party to get ill?  I started with that thought, but knew it wasn’t quite right for the childrens’ series I’m developing concepts for.  So: turn things round, see them from another angle.  What if a kid is isolated from his or her friends by an illness, and those friends willingly expose themselves to the same condition so they can spend time with their pal, figuring time will pass quicker if they’re all sick together?

Yes, that feels like an idea that’d work with this series.  It involves kids and adults, and the kids having a novel perspective on things that the adults don’t get.  I like that.  And I like the opportunity it presents for the kids to spend more time together than they would otherwise.  And that’s gold.  Normally, kids spend as much time with each other as the adults in their lives let them.  So they typically operate by an adult timetable, and are being pulled away from their mates.  With the shared illness, the kids get to be around each other for longer, and the fault lines start to show up.  Little resentments become the basis of bigger disagreements.  The group gets to splinter along whatever lines are most interesting, before coalescing again in a new form.

With this potential, I know there’s a good story to be had.  And it’ll be a change of pace too: the kids normally rove round a really interesting environment, but for this episode they’re confined to barracks.  Hmm, a danger of being less visually interesting, but their quarantine space can still be well designed.  And the opportunity for tension between the characters allows new story possibilities.  One of the kids is an introvert anyway: how will he cope when there is literally no space for him to be on his own?  And what if one of the kids becomes seriously ill?  What started as a prank to show solidarity with a playmate becomes an experience with much bigger consequences.  Some of the characters have experienced death in their young lives already — how will they face up to the loss of a peer, for something that suddenly seems so trivial?

At this stage I’ve got more questions than answers, and that’s fine.  All the questions are generative, and will allow me to craft an episode that will make a great contrast to the others planned.  It’s not an early episode tale — this is one to savour when the audience has got to know the characters, have their favourites, maybe half way through the run of the first series, should we be lucky enough to experience such a result.  Watch this space.