Under the Lights
DQ heads to Belfast to see filming for Blue Lights season three as the BAFTA-winning BBC police drama delves into the hidden world of white-collar crime while members of the PSNI force tackle issues relating to mental health, grief and trauma.
On a quiet, leafy street on a sunny day in East Belfast, a camera attached to a large crane sweeps down through the trees and settles on an unmarked police car for a pivotal scene in the third season of BBC police drama Blue Lights.
Siân Brooke, playing PSNI officer Grace Ellis, sits behind the steering wheel, while a child protection officer in the next seat talks her through what’s about to happen as they prepare to make an early morning arrest relating to a case of child abuse.
“This is called ‘tossing the grenade,’” she’s told. “I’m basically about to blow a family apart.”
When DQ arrives on set in May this year, cast and crew are days away from wrapping the third season of the series, which debuts on BBC One and BBC iPlayer on Monday. There is further reason for celebration – S2 was earlier that week crowned best drama at the BAFTA Television Awards. Co-creator Louise Gallagher still has her own statuette in her rucksack and is frequently stopped by people who want to have photos with it.
Revolving around the work of three rookie officers living and working in Belfast, a city beset by mistrust of the police after the Troubles, Blue Lights first explored the world of nationalism in S1, before shifting to loyalist communities and their struggles in S2.
In the new season, themes of mental health and dealing with trauma and grief come to the fore, as does the hidden exploitation behind white-collar crime. Two years into their jobs as response officers, Grace, Annie (Katherine Devlin) and Tommy (Nathan Braniff) are now accustomed to life under the blue lights. But their work now takes them into a sinister world hidden behind the veneer of middle-class life, and the accountants and lawyers who facilitate organised crime.
Returning cast members include Joanne Crawford (Helen), Andi Osho (Sandra), Abigail McGibbon (Tina) and Andrea Irvine (Nicola), with new additions such as Cathy Tyson as private members club owner Dana Morgan and Michael Smiley as intelligence officer Paul ‘Colly’ Collins.
Speaking to DQ between shots, Brooke says the BAFTA win is still sinking in. She credits the show’s writing with elevating the police drama, having seen something “special” in it from the moment she first read the scripts for S1.
“You could see each character was so finely drawn and so individual. Sometimes you’ll find each character’s voice can be similar. It’s not like that. Everybody has a really relatable, authentic character,” she says. “They write really well for women, and they manage to weave between the subject matters of this location, the history of this city, the complex history of this place and the banter between colleagues. So we go between comedy and high stakes and then also the mundane side of the job. That’s such a hard thing to navigate, but they do it effortlessly.”
In S3, Grace continues to be “the relentless pursuer of justice,” the actor says. “And I love that about her.” Her background as a social worker also becomes key in the central storyline as she is drawn to the plight of a young girl. “She can’t help but be drawn towards the flame, regardless of whether she gets burnt or not. I do like that about her. She will just throw herself in because she believes in the right thing.”
Grace’s relationship with fellow response officer Stevie Neil (Martin McCann) is also set to develop further. “You’ll see that they are trying to make something work, but then again, the beauty of the relationship they’ve created is that you’ve got these two people who have both lived a life before they come together,” Brooke notes. “It’s not love at first sight. It was a slow burn, and they both have to confront things from their past to be able to make that work. Whether they do or they don’t, we’ll have to find out.”
For McCann, S3 is about “higher stakes, more drama.” “The cops have known each other in the show a little longer, so they’re more invested,” he says, “and when things go wrong and people get into danger being a cop – and sometimes that happens – the stakes are higher. We all love each other and we’re invested in each other, and hopefully the audience will feel that.”
Stevie was initially Grace’s training officer, but now the new additions are past the rookie stage, “they’re his equals and they’re his friends,” McCann explains. “He loves them, he cares for them and he also learns from them. They beat me out of my old ways.”
“It’s been heavy this season,” says Devlin, sitting in a full complement of police uniform after completing her final scenes of the day. “It’s been a lot of long days, a lot of highly driven, emotional scenes as well. Particularly for Annie, there’s a big, heavy journey.”
While Grace left a social worker job to join the force and Tommy was initially naïve and seemingly ill-suited to policing, Catholic-raised “camogie girl” Annie was forced to leave her old life behind for a role with the PSNI, highlighting the divisions that can still tear friends and families apart. In S3, she’s struggling with the “two-year fade,” a phenomenon that sees the cumulative effect of 24 months of policing catch up with the recruits, while her mother’s illness means she must confront whether the job is worth it for her.
“She’s sacrificing so much,” Devlin says. “She’s sacrificing her home, her friends, so it’s a question that’s constantly in the back of her head. She’s also now living with Tommy and Aisling (Dearbháile McKinney), which is hilarious. It’s been lovely, particularly getting really close to Dearbháile. It’s really comforting to have someone who is genuinely a mate that you can have a laugh with behind the scenes and be there for each other during the heavy topics.”
Viewers can look forward to “lots of action, a lot of car scenes,” the actor says. “There’s a lot of blood, to be honest.” But S3 stands out as her favourite season of Blue Lights so far. “It’s honest, it’s messy, it’s raw. It’s not sexy – it’s not supposed to be. It’s just real,” Devlin says. “I want people to talk about the topics that are brought up. I want people to talk about the mental health crisis that we do have in Northern Ireland, because these things are so prevalent, and we’re not going to change things unless we do talk about it.”
Meanwhile, after a rough arrival in S2 that saw his new colleagues question his loyalties, PSNI officer Shane Bradley has settled into the team, while his relationship with Annie is “maturing,” says actor Frank Blake. Returning for S3, it’s the first time Blake has reprised a major role on screen. “I love it all, man, but I love the crew, and that’s made coming back really easy,” he says. “It’s just felt like a continuation of what we were doing not so long ago. It’s a lot of the same crew.”
Shane also always ends up doing “a few mad things,” which certainly makes life on the show interesting for Blake. “This year, we had some fun chase scenes in the city centre, which were pretty wild to film,” he says, noting that many of the main characters are involved in the main storyline that charts criminal enterprise from the streets to walled mansions. “Whether it is the [police] guys who are stopping people on the street, or the guys who are investigating what might seem like a petty crime, it’s all actually leading back to something bigger.”
Produced by Two Cities Television and coproduced by Gallagher Films, Blue Lights comes from co-creators Gallagher and Stephen Wright and writers Declan Lawn and Adam Patterson (The Salisbury Poisonings). Before S2 aired in April 2024, the BBC placed an additional two-season order for the show, meaning Lawn and Patterson have had the support of knowing it will definitely return after S3.
“It fundamentally changed everything,” Lawn says, “so we’ve worked on a general 12-episode arc [across seasons three and four]. That doesn’t mean we’ve entirely planned out S4. But we have a general sense of where we’re going to get to. When S3 comes out, some storylines are resolved, and there’s a general sense that the season’s at an end, but there are three or four big storylines that are just set up to pick up afterwards.”
Each new season of the show brings them both a mixture of “confidence and terror,” and pressure to keep up the show’s now BAFTA-winning standards. That means they also want Blue Lights to continue moving, setting up S3’s plotline in a new part of the criminal world and taking inspiration from real police concerns about the role of lawyers and accountants in facilitating crime.
“In a sense, money insulates people,” Lawn explains. “There’s a line in S3 where one of the cops says, ‘These people think the law doesn’t apply to them,’ and that’s something we’re trying to capture, because that happens.”
As with all their work, authenticity is key to the series, with numerous storylines inspired by their research and conversations with around 25 real officers in preparation for each season. One example in S3 is a storyline featuring Aisling, who finds the build-up of trauma she has witnessed in the job becoming too much to bear. “This is something we explore with Aisling, that story of trauma in the police,” Lawn says. “It’s front and centre in this season. It just felt like a really important thing for us to do.”
The idea behind Blue Lights originated in 2015 with Gallagher, who wanted to make a cop show in Northern Ireland and found a way into the story through a social worker friend who decided to join the police – providing the inspiration for Grace. She also wanted events in the show to be seen from the perspectives of the officers, “because what they think they’re going to is not always what it is,” she says. “It could be 10 times worse, or it could be absolutely nothing at all.”
As an example, the exec recalls one story of an officer sent to a home where a neighbour thought they could see someone hanging in the front room. “They could see a figure through the window, but it was very unclear, so they [the police] zoomed in around the back, put the door in, went in and it was a cardboard cutout of Danny DeVito looking out the window,” she says. “So it goes from that to absolutlye horrendous stories. I just felt, ‘There’s something in this.’”
Wright then signed on to develop the series with Lawn and Patterson, who naturally leaned into the show’s authenticity thanks to their journalism backgrounds. “People have really connected to a world they’d never seen before,” Gallagher continues. “It was a really fresh way of looking at policing, and it was coming from a part of these islands we’ve never really heard from, with characters inspired by real people. It’s really great when you hear taxi drivers enjoy it. Taxi drivers in Belfast have got very strong views, and if you get the taxi drivers liking it, then it’s great.”
“It’s the characters. There’s the humanity. That’s what makes the show do well,” says Wright. Distributor BBC Studios has also sold it into more than 160 countries worldwide. “For me, it’s about keeping up the standard of work and keeping the stories fresh, with a real propulsive engine behind them, and allowing the characters to grow
“We’ve seen how the three rookies and their careers have changed, but actually watching the actors own them and have a real sense of purpose behind those characters has been brilliant. As a producer, you want to provide the resources and everything that’s needed to allow them to do good work. That’s your job, to allow people to do their best work and keep the show as magic as possible.”
Directing S3 are Jack Casey and Angela Griffin, who have adopted the show’s “real but optimistic” tone set down by Lawn and Patterson in the scripts and S1 director Gilles Bannier. The writers then shared directing duties with Casey on S2.
“They shot in season one in aspherical glass, which is more visceral and grittier,” says Patterson, who has taken a step back from Blue Lights this year as he leads the work needed to establish his and Lawn’s Sony Pictures Television-backed production company Hot Sauce. “We wanted just a bit more of a cinematic edge in season two, so we changed to anamorphic lenses and shot it in a slightly different way. We wanted to bring a bit more warmth and a bit more Belfast into the world. Those blueprints are [still] there.
“In S3, the filming style changes, but what is retained is the fact that Belfast has to be present, there has to be an air of optimism, and that it’s not basically doom and gloom TV, because it’s not the way we write, so it’s not the way we want it to be directed.”
With S4 confirmed and writing underway, the writers already know how it will end and are “stress testing” the ideas that will get them there. Lawn says: “The tagline for the first season is, ‘Can I do this?’ The second season is, ‘Can I change anything?’ And the third season is, ‘Is it worth it?’ Every single one of them has something happen to them that makes them think, ‘I’m not sure if I want to do this anymore.’ This is, in some ways, quite a dark season. It still has a lot of optimism and humour and fun. But S3 is The Empire Strikes Back, and S4 is going to be Return of the Jedi.”
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