A little boy sits in his parents’ house and waits for a knock on the back door, his mother gives him painkillers and whiskey. “Come on, son… come on, please,” the father pleads as a knock finally rang out, leading the teen on a “date” with the man in the balaclava. Her boy is then forced to lie face down and shot in the back leg.
This gruesome scene opens the third episode of today. blue lights, a BBC One acclaimed police drama set in Belfast. Rookie gang member J.P. Junior (Isaac Heslip) faces this barbaric extrajudicial punishment for dealing “ready” drugs, i.e. skimming things to sell for himself.
The so-called “punitive” vigilante shootings, in which sectarian gangs apply their own brutal discipline, may have been something we read about all over the Irish Sea. But they are rarely, if ever, shown on television, despite being common in Northern Ireland. In 2019, the last recorded year before the pandemic, such paramilitary shootings or beatings occurred every four days.
A doubly terrible aspect of “knee pads” is the approval of his parents. They know that if they do not sacrifice their son in such an almost Old Testament way, they will face even greater retribution.
blue lights follows three interns working alongside grizzled veterans and gives the writers the opportunity to explain Belfast policing without clumsy reams of explanatory dialogue. For example, why some crime suspects and their surroundings are “OOB” (out of bounds) and why undercover M15 agents (remembered as “Sneaky Beaks”) operate in the city.
After watching all six episodes, I realized that this is no ordinary police TV show. It is also an insightful look at the street realities of Belfast after the peace process. The authors, Declan Lone and Adam Patterson, are from Northern Ireland and former investigative journalists who have worked together. panorama before moving on to drama in 2018 Salisbury poisoning. Her exploration of the realities of policing in such a specific community is light-hearted and laced with gallows humor.
Viewers in mainland Britain might easily assume that the post-war police in Belfast are not much different from those in London or Manchester. We ditched that idea within minutes of the opening episode, when Grace Ellis (Sian Brook), the new PSNI operations officer, looked under her car before leaving home. Here’s a police operation with permission: arrivals in certain areas ended with the throwing of stones and bottles at the officers.
The police are working hard every day, and the fourth episode next week focuses on just one Saturday night when the agency is working at its limit.
But the particular complexity of the work of the police in Belfast makes the series so interesting and unusual. required string will also be filmed in Belfast, but set in an unspecified city, which may be Birmingham. No doubt where you are blue lights.