“When serious crime happens, someone doesn’t want us anywhere near it.”
When it first aired, Blue Lights was lumped in with Line of Duty: a murky world of cops stymied by other, perhaps corrupt cops. But such comparisons did this spectacular show a disservice. Where LOD had long since devolved into self-parody, here was a drama that felt totally fresh, a bobby on a brand new beat.
And boy was this ever a nightmarish beat. Set in Belfast, where the Troubles and sectarian violence still seemed harrowingly close, Blue Lights showed officers – or peelers as much of the public referred to them – being harangued constantly. They were spat at, head-butted, had bricks and bottles thrown at their cars and were punched in the face with alarming frequency. Every morning, the officers checked their cars for bombs – and ripped their name badges off before they patrolled certain areas, to avoid receiving death threats. They also had their own rulebook thrown at them whenever they stopped and searched a person of interest – here, mainly associates of the McIntyre clan of organised criminals.
Three rookies were thrown into the fray at the start, beautifully drawn and deeply relatable, like the rest of the cast. There was Annie (Katherine Devlin), who seemed so hardened she should have sailed through her probation period – if only she could stop showing up for shifts hungover or even drunk. There was Grace (Siân Brooke), a former social-worker who honestly believed she could help the people of Belfast, the organised criminals too, and took wild risks to do so. Then there was Tommy (Nathan Braniff), who decided not to follow his parents into academia, instead wishing to see what policework was like from an anthropological perspective.
He soon learns. Thankfully, Tommy had battle-hardened Gerry as his partner. “Don’t be a notebook wanker, lad,” he says. “No one likes a notebook wanker.” Gerry, played by Richard Dormer, was one of the best TV characters in years: a hilarious and indefatigable copper who’d been on foot patrol his entire career, too pigheaded and anti-authoritarian to ever be promoted.
Blue Lights felt at times like a catalogue of horrifying moments: a bad batch of drugs meant near-constant OD cases on one shift; a rookie’s first attempt at CPR went disastrously wrong; a child had an appointment kneecapping that his own parents were in on. But somehow, remarkably, it was leavened with funny moments that broke the tension and always rang true. It even had a burgeoning romance between Grace and her patrol partner, the cynical “mystery man” Stevie (Martin McCann).
Written by Declan Lawn and Adam Patterson – the team behind The Salisbury Poisonings – with Fran Harris, this was six hours of raw, relentless TV. The layers built up stunningly, as our constables headed into each awful new scenario. Everywhere they turned, the police were hamstrung by people or places being deemed out of bounds, or OOB. And when MI5 – or “the sneaky beakies” – started speeding through the city in their unmarked cars, Gerry (it had to be him) decided to find out what’s really going on.
The peripheral characters were no 2D plot assisters, either. Take Happy (Paddy Jenkins), an old friend of Gerry’s, a man so lonely he constantly begged to be arrested so he didn’t have to stay at home. In an air-punch moment, Happy proved pivotal in Gerry’s investigation into why they were unable to police their own streets. Another character who ended up being key to the case was PC Jen (Hannah McClean), a woman so afraid of active duty she did everything to avoid it, including sleeping with the weak and endlessly malleable station boss. At the show’s heart-stopping climax, which had one of the most devastating TV deaths of the decade, Jen was first to the scene – the absolute last person you’d want there. Never have the words “She went through that gate” been so loaded.
When did you last watch a whole show with bated breath? Blue Lights was a thrilling examination of everyday courage and rebellion that showed how easily the overly hopeful can be crushed. So forget Line of Duty. This was more like a Belfast version of The Wire. And just like in Baltimore, the shit ran downhill here. But as Stevie says, all you can do as a police officer is be “a bucket man” – catch as much shit as you can carry, then try to leave it behind you at the end of each day. What a job.
