TV Pick of the Week: Blue Lights - Review by Yvette Huddleston

The series follows three new recruits to the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) – since 2001 the peace-time replacement for the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) – as they complete their probationary period. Grace (Sian Brooke) is a fortysomething ex-social worker and single mother who is making a midlife career change – she is English but has lived in Belfast for twenty years; Tommy (Nathan Braniff), about as green as you can get, is a recent graduate on the fast track; and tough-talking, streetwise Annie (Katherine Devlin) is not quite as resilient as she seems. Each are partnered with mentors, more experienced beat cops who have been around the block a few times.

Grace’s strength lies in her excellent people skills and her caring nature – she genuinely wants to make a difference, something that her jaded partner Stevie (Martin McCann), who has long since given up on such an aim, finds difficult to fathom. “We do what we can on the day,” he tells her. “That’s it. That’s where the job ends.” The trauma of having lived through the Troubles is alluded to several times, but is never heavy-handed and points up a generational difference in approach to policing – those who remember the era before the peace process are more alert to the sensitivities at play. There is a pin-drop moment in an early episode when Gerry (Richard Dormer) tells a wide-eyed Tommy about witnessing at close range the bloody devastation of a bomb blast as a child in the 1970s.

Central to the complex, skilfully-executed narrative is the team’s attempt to crack a long-established drug-running criminal gang, headed up by James McIntyre (John Lynch), with past links to terrorism who appear to be untouchable and exercise their own form of justice on the streets of Belfast. As the Good Friday Agreement reaches its 25th anniversary this month, the series also serves as a salutary reminder of the long shadow that the Troubles still cast in Northern Ireland – and how sectarian violence is not entirely a thing of the past.