A Way In

It airs not just in the UK and the Republic but in countries like Australia, Holland, Norway, Poland, India, Singapore and Malaysia.

BBC1’s ‘Blue Lights’ has made one hell of an impression inside and outside Northern Ireland.

But nowhere is it more scrutinised than in the home patch of its creators Declan Lawn and Adam Patterson – especially here on Slugger.

So here we are again – a new series, a new set of characters and a new challenge for the series regulars.

What’s not to get excited about?

As with Series One and Two, as each episode airs on BBC1 every Monday, Slugger will review it.

So if you’re binge watching the entire series on the iPlayer, great but please don’t put spoilers in the comments below.

Respect those of us who are following it the old school, linear TV way.

Series Three got underway with an affectionate montage of images of Belfast at night as director Jack Casey and his cinematographer Paul Morris conjured up gorgeous shots of the city to the sound of ‘Dirty Old Town’.

The camera soon settled on a squad car around Academy Street where Sian Brooke’s Grace Ellis and Martin McCann’s Stevie Neil were scrolling through a property app as they considered buying a home together.

Now a proper couple, Stevie wasn’t sold on them buying a place in the city.

The amateur baker quickly changed subject, as he proudly shared some cupcakes he had made.

Grace was savouring these when they were rudely interrupted by William Thompson who shouted an expletive about “the peelers”.

He and his fellow stand up comic Mickey Bartlett appeared as drunk idiots on a night out who quickly regretted rapping the windows of the squad car after Stevie confronted them.

It didn’t take long for Patterson and Lawn, though, to start serving up the real meat of their latest cops and criminals tale.

Two young drug dealers Aoife Hughes’ Lindsay Singleton and Jack McBride-Marshall’s Sandy McKnight braved the cold Belfast night as they received messages from clients via an app.

Lindsay had previously dealt coke to Conor Mullen’s shambles of an accountant George McClelland.

But what she didn’t realise when she later met Sandy was that he was under surveillance from a police intelligence unit known as C1.

As C1 prepared to swoop on the duo, their operation was foiled by Frank Blake’s Blackthorn Police Station officer Shane Bradley and Nathan Braniff’s Tommy Foster who recognised Sandy from their squad car and decided to confront him.

Deleting the app, Sandy panicked when Shane insisted on searching him for cannabis and soon the two police officers were pursuing him on foot through Botanic.

Luckily, Stevie and Grace were on hand to apprehend Sandy who blotted his copybook by sitting on the former’s cupcakes which he had baked for a party to celebrate the stations’s former rookies becoming proper police officers.

“Sandy you have done some bad shit in your time but this is the worst. I can’t believe you sat on my cupcakes,” Stevie muttered in disgust as they arrived at the police station.

As soon as they arrived, Sandy was taken off their hands by Julian Moore Cook’s C1 DCI Damien Marshall and Debra Hill’s DS Mary Quigley.

Lurking in the background was their senior officer Michael Smiley’s Paul ‘Colly’ Collins who gazed affectionately at a photo of Blackthorn’s slain officer from the first series, Gerry Cliff.

Colly spoke to Gerry’s widow, Andi Osho’s desk sergeant Sandra, telling her her husband was a legend in the Special Branch.

He was there to see Joanne Crawford’s Inspector Helen McNally who was surprised that Colly was taking an interest in a low level criminal like Sandy.

However Colly revealed they were focusing on an app used to ferry drugs across Belfast for the Dublin gang running it, the Ginleys who killed Gerry Cliff.

‘The Ginleys are a cancer, Helen,” he told her.

“Their motto is if you’re not growing, you’re dying. When they take over a town, they get everywhere – judges, solicitors, accountants. They use everyone and everything. They done it in Dublin and they’re doing it here.”

It soon became clear to viewers that the Ginleys were courting respectability in Belfast via a private members club for the well to do called The Deanery run by Cathy Tyson’s Dana Morgan.

A swanky do at the club went pear shaped, however, when George McClelland and his mates took some of the cocaine he had purchased earlier from Lindsay.

Not long after making an idiot of himself at the club, McClelland suffered a heart attack.

Tommy and Shane had been planning to join Tommy’s girlfriend Dearbhaile McKinney’s Aisling and Katherine Devlin’s Annie Conlon for a boozy celebration at Blackthorn of them ending their probationary period as police officers.

Their plan was foiled when Sandra Cliff dispatched them instead to the exclusive club.

Aisling and Annie were sent to a raucous rave on a housing estate following a complaint by a neighbour.

After switching off the music, they discovered a crying infant girl in a nearby room while her mum was high.

Securing a temporary order to hand the child over to social workers, Annie was appalled when the mum seemed to not really give a damn.

Meanwhile back in Blackthorn, Sandy was twitching in an interview room with DCI Marshall and DS Quigley when ‘Blue Lights’ busiest defence solicitor Matthew Forsythe’s cocky Aodhan McAllister arrived.

Surprised to learn that Marshall was now working for C1, he nervously relayed this news back to Charlie Maher’s Dublin criminal Fogerty and then instructed Sandy to say nothing and meet the crime boss with Lindsay at a mill.

While looking at Shane’s bodycam footage from the earlier pursuit of Sandy, Grace recognised Lindsay as a kid she encountered in care when she was a social worker and she talked Stevie into tracking the 17 year old down.

With Colly also desperate to use Sandy as a way of infiltrating the Ginley gang and Fogerty getting a dressing down from Dana Morgan about Thompson’s overdose in the club, the stakes were high for Sandy.

Would the young man turn stool pigeon or clam up?

Episode One of Series Three got off to a rip-roaring start, with a tight, pacy and very rich plot.

For those of us who felt the show was showing signs of losing its edge in Series Two, it was relief to find ‘Blue Lights’ back to its gritty best.

The episode built up hopes that Patterson and Lawn may be preparing to take ‘Blue Lights’ into more complex, darker terrain.

The episode’s acting honours went to Smiley who proved a terrific addition to the cast, using his experience and enigmatic screen presence to keep us guessing about whether Colly is as straightforward as he seems.

In the show’s anchor roles, McCann and Brooke remained comfortable and charismatic, while Blake continued to impress as a character who is not afraid to push the boundaries of being a cop while riding alongside Foster’s rather straightlaced Tommy.

Hughes and McBride-Marshall also shone while Mullen, Maher and Tyson did enough to make you wonder where their characters might go.

Lawn and Patterson delivered their sweariest episode yet but that somehow made it feel even more authentic.

The episode was really slickly directed by Casey.

Belfast has rarely looked better onscreen and a lot of that was due to Morris who superbly lit many shots and film editor Helen Sheridan who kept the show rolling along at a nerve shredding pace.

If the next five episodes can maintain the standard of this opening instalment, then we’re really in for a treat.

(Episode One of Series Three of ‘Blue Lights’ aired on BBC1 in September 29, 2025 with all episodes made available on the BBC iPlayer on the same day).