“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” I’ve been watching a lot of Blue Lights recently, and Faulkner’s line is beginning to feel like it was lifted from its scripts. This unlikely global hit takes place in the graffitied estates of modern Belfast. Unlike Berlin, where history is memorialised on every street corner, Belfast is wrestling with something alive. Memories are long, trauma begets trauma, and the “post” in post-Troubles is semantically shaky. As the rookie cops of the PSNI – Police Service of Northern Ireland – discover, 30 years of bloody sectarian tit-for-tat can’t ever really be put to bed.
Tasked with making order of the chaos are the newest “peelers” to arrive at Blackthorn Station. The Northern Irish equivalent of London’s “bobbies” – both names derive from that of Sir Robert Peel, founder of the Metropolitan Police – the peelers are the frontline of the unglamorous world of response policing. Catholic Annie Conlon (Katherine Devlin) is not long at the station before her name and address are found on an Irish Republican dissident hit list. Midlands-born Grace Ellis (Siân Brooke), a former social worker, launches herself into Belfast’s bristling estates with good intentions and an almost suicidal naivety. Tommy Foster (Nathan Braniff) is so green I have to watch through fingers every time he gets out of the patrol car, and Jen Robinson (Hannah McLean) is the well-connected fast-tracker who will sell her soul for a file day.
The fraught history of law enforcement in Northern Ireland means that the team’s policing efforts can be not only unwelcome but incendiary. The new call signs are as likely to lead to a paramilitary kneecapping as a peaceful death from natural causes, and peelers are often RTB (returning to base) nursing injuries inflicted by an unreceptive citizenry. There are loyalist enclaves to navigate, unpredictable gangland alliances, entrenched protection rackets, and the top brass at Blackthorn keep as many secrets as they reveal. At times this context makes the whole enterprise feel bafflingly masochistic. In series two, Annie and new transfer Shane (Frank Blake) risk life and limb to save a mother and child from a burning building and are thanked by exactly no one. Why they doggedly persist is one of Blue Lights’ central questions.
There’s a beautiful yin-yang dynamic in the cultural gulf that separates those with lived memory of the Troubles and those coming up amid its aftershocks. Gerry Cliff (Richard Dormer) is a grizzled ex-Special Branch officer who introduces baby-faced Tommy to Johnny Cash and the “sneaky beakies” (MI5), who routinely release the criminals the peelers have just risked death to arrest. Grace’s offsider is Stevie Neil (Martin McCann), a taciturn widower who brings his home-baked slices to the patrol car and likens response policing to collecting an endless flow of shit in a bucket. They’re ciphers for different approaches to social change: Stevie and Gerry with their cheerful resignation, and Grace and Tommy with their epic, transformational shifts. There is tenderness towards the arbitrariness of disadvantage too. Gerry chastises a young constable for calling some locals “scumbags”. “Belfast is a hard place to police,” he cautions, “but it’s also a hard place to live.”
At the top are the older guard, who made impossible decisions during the Troubles and find themselves caught on the wrong side of the line. The hard-nosed Chief Superintendent Robinson (Andrea Irvine) is retrospectively judged for her pragmatism during what was almost-but-not-quite a civil war, and Inspector Helen McNally (Joanne Crawford) is relatable as the skipper torn between her charges and her duty to execute the dictates from on high. The only southern accent in the show belongs to Sandra Cliff (Andi Osho), who is spectacular, particularly as the seasons progress.
Blue Lights sounds an unlikely barrel of laughs, but like Derry Girls, another output of the Northern Irish creative renaissance, the judicious application of humour is the culturally apposite way to deal with raging trauma.
The show’s writers, Declan Lawn and Adam Patterson, called the series concept a “hot potato”, which is as much a gem of Irish understatement as the “Troubles”. The PSNI are the evolution of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, the militarised police force that sought to uphold order during the Troubles. It was, and is, overwhelmingly Protestant, seen as an extension of British colonial rule and a brutal suppresser of Republican protest. At least 300 RUC officers were killed during the Troubles and even today Catholic police are subject to harassment and death threats by dissidents who do not accept the Good Friday Agreement.
Blue Lights sounds an unlikely barrel of laughs, but like Derry Girls, another output of the Northern Irish creative renaissance, the judicious application of humour is the culturally apposite way to deal with raging trauma. “If we had Spanish weather we’d never have had the Troubles” drawls Tina McIntyre (Abigail McGibbon), the imperturbable matriarch who has reigned through all four seasons. Her host bats back with the Spanish Civil War. “Aye, but that didn’t last 30 years, did it?” says Tina. “You know why?” She takes a sip of her pina colada. “Weather was too nice.”
It all feels so authentic, one can easily fall into the trap of imagining it’s scripted reality television. On seeing the actors dressed up for the BAFTAs, my first, unfiltered thought was, “Ahhh, the cops get to go to the ball!” The staff kitchen is the most realistic one I’ve seen on screen, right down to the water bottle graveyards and peeling signs with inconsistent capitalisation. With the notable exception of a cartel head who enunciates each line as if to the back rows of a pantomime, the acting is effortless, even in single episode characters – a shell-shocked man who euthanised his terminally ill husband was so raw that I found myself hijacked by tears.
Its authenticity is driven by its creators, Lawn and Patterson, who were both raised in Northern Ireland and trained as investigative journalists. Having met on the BBC’s flagship current affairs program, Panorama, the rigour of journalism is clearly their sensibility.
It’s a glorious example of that addictive new genre: ordinary people doing their jobs really well. The more they burrow into the minutiae of, say, the restaurant business in Chicago (The Bear), or the post-Good Friday challenges of policing Belfast, the more the specific becomes the window to the universal. There’s always a whole lexicon of industry jargon to adopt too. In Blue Lights we get “flakkers” (bullet-proof vests), “craic-uum” (a place with no fun) and the ubiquitous “wise up!” McNally’s dignified “I won’t stand over it” (I won’t endorse it/have any part in it) really zings. What one will and won’t “stand over” winds up being the crux of this final season.
The Faulkner character who delivered that classic quote later calls for justice, the truth and the “simple desire to sleep right at night”. This is the final psychological reckoner for all the characters in Blue Lights. They must choose what to stand over: secrets or lies, forgiveness or revenge, idealism or despair. None of this chaos can be irrevocably fixed. But the show valorises the kind of change that happens when everyday people make small, principled decisions. Over and over and over again.
Blue Lights is streaming on SBS on Demand.