Blue Lights, series 2, review: British TV’s best crime drama returns in the finest of health

A revelation: Martin McCann and Siân Brooke as Belfast coppers Stevie Neil and Grace Ellis – Christopher Barr/BBC

The world did not need another cop show when Blue Lights debuted on BBC One last year, which was probably one reason why at first no one paid it much attention. The name didn’t do much to inspire, the setting – frontline policing in Belfast – was hardly high glamour, and the logline, following three new bobbies as the scales were lifted from their eyes, was bog standard.

Wrong, it turned out, on every count: Blue Lights was a revelation, a ratings hit for the BBC that was quickly recommissioned for another series – and then two more. As told by Declan Lawn and Adam Patterson, two investigative documentary makers who’d cut their teeth on Panorama and who knew the turf, response policing in post-Troubles Northern Ireland was both riveting and revelatory.

The pillars of Blue Lights’ success, however, were the pillars of all good drama: characters, relationships and a story set in a world both vital and credible. That world was provided by Lawn and Patterson’s understanding of Belfast now and of the historical fault-lines that underpin every interaction between the police and the public. The characters and relationships came from a superb coterie of actors, foremost among them Siân Brooke and the brilliant newcomers Katherine Devlin and Nathan Braniff.

With all of that established, series two just required a new story and in that regard – at first – it seemed as if the writers were content with more of the same. Belfast is in chaos, there are drugs everywhere and with government cutbacks, not enough police to do anything about it. A new broom, the smarmy DS Murray Canning (Desmond Eastwood) from series one, is brought in to sort it out and instantly rubs everyone at the Blackthorn Station up the wrong way with his doctrine of containment over enforcement. The two warring loyalists who run the Mount Eden Estate are replaced by a new kingpin, Lee Thompson (Seamus O’Hara). But he still rules with a rod of iron.

It doesn’t take long, however, for series two to catch light, and once it does it is irresistible. New boss Thompson turns out to have some noble – if twisted – motives, creating a form of moral chaos to go with the actual chaos all around him. It all goes to foment an environment in which anything could, and does, happen, but crucially, one that skips effortlessly from comedy to breakneck drama, profundity to arguments about cake. When you have writers and a cast who can sustain that tension, you have must-see TV, both effective and affecting.

Series two of Blue Lights begins on BBC One at 9pm tonight; the box set is available on BBC iPlayer now

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