It’s absolute chaos from the get-go.” Katherine Devlin is talking about Blue Lights, the dizzying BBC One drama in which she plays a rookie police officer called Annie. And it really is. In episode one, her character gets lamped. Throws up. Is spat on. Gets bombarded with death threats. Is forced to move out of her home. Set in Belfast, a city in a state of imperfect peace 25 years on from the Good Friday Agreement, the show is a nail-biting insight into the sheer nightmare of daily life for some officers in the Police Service of Northern Ireland.
While the show is not out-and-out “copaganda” – it actually highlights many of the flaws in the peace era force that replaced the Royal Ulster Constabulary in 2001 – it does make you feel for the fresh recruits at its centre, and leaves you wondering, why on earth do any of them go to work in the morning? “Going into the police force [which is majority Protestant], particularly if you’re from a Catholic background like Annie, seems like something that you have to be dedicated to, because your life is quite literally on the line,” Devlin tells me, sipping on a fizzy water in the café at London’s Soho Theatre. “But Annie is stubborn as hell, and her politics and upbringing aside, she genuinely wants to do the right thing.”
