Red Eye: Now we’re about to find out the truth of what’s been going on

After that he moved to the US and began selling screenplays; his first major success came with Flightplan, a psychological thriller starring Jodie Foster, in which she plays a widowed aircraft engineers whose trip from Berlin back home to the US turns into a nightmare when her daughter disappears.

Clearly the idea of being trapped on the flight from hell stuck with Dowling, because he adopted the same setting for Red Eye, which comes to its thrilling conclusion this Sunday.

“I’ve always been drawn to stories set in a confined location because I find that the restrictions, rather than hindering the storytelling process, actually ignite my creativity,” explains Dowling.

“Settling on an Agatha Christie-type murder mystery on a plane, I decided the heart of Red Eye would be a police officer escorting a prisoner somewhere for a crime he claims he didn’t commit.

“But the project only fully sparked to life when the idea of a red eye flight to Beijing was decided upon, which would dictate that the police officer escorting our prisoner back to China, to avoid cultural misunderstandings, would probably be Asian, as would the flight staff and many of the passengers.

"Suddenly the show had a vitality and contemporary feel that reflected the multicultural world we live in.”

From there, Dowling began dreaming up his characters, with the female lead coming first: “As far as I knew, there had never been a Chinese-British policewoman leading an English show and, at that moment, DC Hana Li was born, a wonderfully complex woman who struggles inside with her own cultural identity but has no hesitance on the job or in her abilities as a detective.

“All that we then needed was an equally multifaceted prisoner and when we landed up on the idea of a surgeon, Dr Matthew Nolan, who had visited China to give lectures, we knew that he could be instrumental in helping Hana investigate the growing number of deaths onboard, someone who could grow from her antagonist to her partner.”

That has certainly happened, with other, equally intriguing characters popping up back in London, where the CIA and MI5 have also become interested on what’s been happening in the air.

Now we’re about to find out the truth of what’s been going on, who’s been behind the entire plot, and who lives to tell the tale.

Dowling claims that although he’s written and directed in Hollywood, “Red Eye is the project I am most proud of, so far, in my career. Spanning the globe from the nightclubs of Beijing to the streets of London, it is a fantastically visualised, brilliantly acted, wonderfully suspenseful series.

“Here’s hoping DC Hana Li can return for more.” And so say all of us!