The BBC’s best drama is back. Blue Lights, which follows rookie police officers in Northern Ireland, was a stealth hit in 2023, followed by a Bafta-winning second series in 2024. And I’m happy to tell you that the quality remains sky-high for series three.
There are gripping set pieces – anyone still traumatised by the death of wonderful Gerry in the first instalment will have their heart in their mouth here over the fate of another major character – but it’s the bond between the officers that gives Blue Lights its heart. Annie (Katherine Devlin) compares it to playing Gaelic football for club and county: your county teammates will go to your funeral. Your clubmates will carry your coffin. These are clubmates.
Writers Declan Lawn and Adam Patterson pull on threads from previous series, immersing us in the world of organised crime and cocaine dealing, but their focus this time is as much on the buyers as the sellers.
Shane (Frank Blake) rails against the “nice, respectable, middle-class people who go to dinner parties, they drink some wine and do a few wee lines and think what they do doesn’t really count”. This is not an original idea, of course, but it gives the show somewhere new to go. A swanky private members’ club run by Dana Morgan (Cathy Tyson) attracts the city’s monied, middle-aged professionals, but an accidental overdose by one of the patrons also attracts the attention of the PSNI.
A new character, intelligence officer Paul “Colly” Collins (Michael Smiley), arrives to work alongside the team – helping or hindering them, depending on your point of view. Smiley is a good addition to the cast, but it’s the series regulars with whom we want to spend the most time, especially the sweet-natured Grace and Stevie (Siân Brooke and Martin McCann), who are now a fully fledged couple.
Stevie is offered a promotion to sergeant, while Grace takes on a case with links back to her old job as a social worker. If I had to pick a star of this series it would be Frank Blake as Shane, whose cockiness has given way to something more genuine. He also gets the funniest lines.
Frank Blake as Shane Bradley is the star of this series – Peter Marley
The first episode is a scene-setter, and it gets better with every instalment. Actress and presenter Angela Griffin ably directs some of the episodes, including a suspenseful car sequence that wouldn’t have been out of place in Line of Duty.
The Belfast setting, its history and sectarian tensions, is woven into every aspect of the show. Annie, a Catholic, continues to receive death threats over her choice of job.
In series one, the naivety of the probationary officers was to the fore. They’ve now been in the job for two years and have a great deal more confidence, but they still react with shock or fear to new situations, including a gruesome road traffic accident. They also deal in the day-to-day: call-outs to mental health crises or parties that are causing a noise nuisance. There is a credibility to the characters and the way they behave. And there is a warmth to them, which is a quality absent from many crime dramas.
Blue Lights series 3 is available now on BBC iPlayer and airs on BBC One on Monday 29 September at 9pm
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