As we approach the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday agreement, you’ll find little on television that says as much about a changing Northern Ireland as Blue Lights. A new drama written by two local lads, ex-journalists Adam Patterson and Declan Lawn, this BBC One show focuses on a trio of new recruits to the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI), the peace-era force that in 2001 succeeded the militarised Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC). Entertaining cop-show staples – thrilling car chases, tense hostage negotiations, off-duty banter – are all present and correct, but what makes the show stand out is the way they’re set among Belfast-specific realism.
Police procedurals can be found on almost every channel every evening of the week, but most are propelled by mystery investigation plots, concerning the comparatively glamorous activities of plain-clothed detectives. Not since ITV’s The Bill aired its last in 2010 have beat coppers been front and centre. Yet unlike that predictable and usually plodding drama, Blue Lights’ story of uniformed rookies and their training officers grips from start to finish. This is partly because of the show’s textured depiction of Belfast – a place with complex, particular policing issues – and partly because the characters are so rounded and believable. The series’ emotional pay-off, when it comes, hits hard because it’s so well earned.
Best-known for 2020’s espionage-laced true-crime drama The Salisbury Poisonings, Patterson and Lawn met years earlier while working on Panorama. And yet, says Patterson, “We felt we came nowhere as near to telling the truth about Belfast with journalism as we have with drama.”
For Siân Brooke, one of Blue Lights’ few non-Northern Irish cast members, the show has already had its intended effect: “It gave me a deeper understanding of what makes the city unique and where it is today,” she says of her four months on location. “It’s not the binary thing; it’s not just black and white. This is Belfast in full-colour HDTV.”
Brooke’s previous roles include Eurus Holmes in BBC One’s Sherlock, the more intelligent younger sister of Benedict Cumberbatch’s master detective, and police chief Cressida Dick in a dramatisation of the Stephen Lawrence murder investigation. By comparison, her Blue Lights character – PC Grace Ellis, a 41-year-old single mum making a midlife career pivot from social work to policing – is more relatable. “It’s not worthiness; she genuinely sees people and thinks: ‘I really just want to make it a bit better for that person.’” Brooke admires Grace’s idealistic streak, though it does get her in trouble. “She’s a lot more courageous than I am. If I were told in a new job to rein my neck in, I probably would! I like that she doesn’t.”
Grace has spent the last 20 years living in Belfast, but it’s been written into the script that she hails from the English Midlands – just like Brooke. This means there’s no danger of wayward vowels, a la Brad Pitt in 1997 IRA thriller The Devil’s Own, which she says wouldn’t have gone down well on this set. “Thank God! They’d have given me so much ribbing!”
More specifically, Brooke comes from Lichfield, Staffordshire, where she was raised by a teacher mother and – usefully – a police officer father. “He was all ranks, my dad. He worked his way up from bobby on the beat until he was CID.” He wasn’t a direct influence on her portrayal of Grace, she says: “I mean, my dad is a big giant Welshman, so … ” But, she adds, “I know that my dad always conducted himself with honour. And I know that fed into it, because when I read the script, I was like: ‘Yeah, I know that person.’”
At the other extreme of Blue Lights’ Belfast-familiarity scale is Brooke’s castmate, the Armagh-born Richard Dormer – who has been living in Belfast for the last 20 years. He plays PC Gerard “Gerry” Cliff, a rough-hewn veteran who, despite his affable nature and evident competence, has never ascended the ranks. Not that he’s especially bothered. “I really wanted it to come across that he’s a man who happens to be in a costume, the police uniform,” says Dormer. “He’s not an uber-cop.”
Gerry doesn’t wear the regulation hat, but he does wear non-regulation shades, and he enjoys the odd cheeky cig out of the window of his police vehicle. These details are the marks of a man who puts unpretentious decency above all else. “He’s the uncle who comes out at Christmas and does fart jokes,” adds Dormer, before reconsidering. “Actually, I don’t think he would do fart jokes … but he would laugh if someone else did, to make them feel comfortable. He’s always thinking about other people.”
Gerry has been given the responsibility for training the greenest of the PSNI’s new recruits, Tommy, played by Nathan Braniff in his screen debut, and Dormer says their on-set relationship mirrored their characters: “Because Nathan’s a lovely young pup and I’m old enough to be his dad, and I don’t have kids and neither does the character.”
Dormer was already a renowned Rada-trained stage actor when he had his on-screen break in 2012’s Good Vibrations as Terri Hooley, the Belfast punk pioneer who helped discover the Undertones. It’s a film that’s still close to his heart. “The reason I’m so proud of it and I love it so much is because it’s about someone doing something in spite of the Troubles, not because of the Troubles, y’know? He’s going: ‘I’m gonna open a record shop, I’m gonna live my life and I’m gonna get people in the community together.’”
That might be Dormer’s best-loved role, but his best-known is as gallant knight Beric Dondarrion in HBO’s fantasy juggernaut Game of Thrones. It’s another show shot in Northern Ireland, but it could hardly be more different: “Well, for one, Gerry doesn’t have a flaming sword,” laughs Dormer, before slipping into misty-eyed reverie. “Ugh, I loved that flaming sword … I do miss science-fiction fantasy. I just love it. That’s my thing.”
Cop shows, though? Not so much. For the young Dormer, growing up in 1970s and 80s Northern Ireland, police were an omnipresent source of fear not fascination. “I remember the RUC 30 years ago and, because it was a civil war, they were a lot tougher. They were very scary guys with machine guns. Nobody wanted to be anywhere near them. I’m a Protestant, so I had nothing to be afraid of, technically, but they didn’t know that.”
His memories of that time are visceral and sensory. He describes the “vrrrrrrruuuuurrr” hum of an approaching RUC armoured Land Rover and the “blub-ub-ub” of vibrating windows after an explosion. “The glass would wobble and you could tell how far away the bomb was: ‘Oh that’s eight miles away, that’s in Dunmurry … that one was in Finaghy … ’ It became that normalised.” It is only more recently that he’s begun to understand the deep impact these experiences made. “A lot of people of my generation actually have – and I don’t say this lightly – post-traumatic stress disorder, y’know? Because we lived constantly on our nerves and we became used to it.”
There’s a generation gap now, between those who remember the Troubles and those who don’t, which is something Blue Lights explores, mainly through Gerry’s genial mentorship of the PSNI’s baby bobbies – or “peelers” to use the (often derogatory) local lingo. Meanwhile, the perspective of the well-meaning but clueless outsider is represented by Grace, an ex-social worker and an English one at that. There are, however, some circumstances in which her ignorance of local tensions comes in handy. “It’s so complex – the history of it, the politics – sometimes you can lose your way trying to tick all the boxes,” says Brooke. “I think there is something in that clarity of thought, that purity of mind and heart … it can just get things done.”
Grace’s idealism leads her to ask a question of her PSNI training officer Stevie (Martin McCann) which seems particularly relevant in these times of mooted police reform: “Have you ever thought that maybe there’s a different way of doing this job?” It’s not quite a searing indictment of TV “copaganda” – the term used to criticise police procedurals that justify and/or soft-pedal police misconduct – but it does show that Blue Lights has space for nuance. “I don’t think the show is there to defend or attack the police,” says Brooke. “It’s there to paint a full picture, and then it’s for the viewer to take away what they want to. But essentially it’s about people, human beings, who happen to do that job. It’s about how they rub along together at work and how they rub along together when they’re at home.”
This humanising element – depicting cops as neither trigger-happy action heroes nor straw men for social justice arguments – is key to the success of the whole “Belfast-set cop show” enterprise. It’s what makes Blue Lights so watchable, whatever our allegiances or level of personal investment. Just ask sci-fi fantasy fan Dormer: “If it had been about the RUC I wouldn’t have done it,” he says firmly. “But because this is progressive, and it’s looking to the future, and it’s hopeful, I was eager. I hope you get to see the human beings under those big stab vests.”
Blue Lights is on BBC One on 27 March at 9pm.
