This is a busy and productive period for high-concept police dramas, so you might be forgiven for thinking, ‘Oh God, not another one’. Don’t sleep on Blue Lights, however; it’s well-crafted, fantastically tense, thrilling stuff, created by The Salisbury Poisonings’ Declan Lawn and Adam Patterson. Set in Belfast, it follows three new and extremely green recruits to the Police Service of Northern Ireland, who have two months of their probationary period left to serve. If this action-stuffed opener is anything to go by, those two months are not going to slide by quietly.
As in Grey’s Anatomy, the idea of chucking a load of naive newcomers into a horribly stressful and dangerous environment for which they are inevitably unprepared all but guarantees excitement. Here, our three rookies are Grace (Siân Brooke), a former social worker and single mother in her early 40s, who has made a midlife career change; Annie (Katherine Devlin), a hard-partying, tough-on-the-surface young woman who has to lie about her chosen profession in her private life. “What kind of dickhead applies for fast track?” she asks, churlishly, in the staff room. Step forward the sheepish Tommy (Nathan Braniff), earnest, hard-working and on the fast track scheme, though he needs to refine his people skills if he has any hope of possessing authority. We are plunged straight into the fray with a high-speed car chase through narrow country lanes. “Remember your training, Grace, get the rifle,” says her “tutor”, Stevie (Martin McCann), which is certainly more treacherous than having to remember how everyone likes their tea.
