Blue Lights: Bafta-winning show an attempt to make a Northern Ireland police drama that feels real to officers, says creator
Bafta-winning Blue Lights is an attempt to make a drama that feels real to police officers, co-creator Declan Lawn has said.
The BBC show picked up a coveted “Best Drama” gong on Sunday night (11th), the biggest prize of the Bafta ceremony.
The hit series, currently filming its third season, follows new police recruits as they learn the ropes of law enforcement in a post-conflict Northern Ireland.
Accepting the award at the Royal Festival Hall, series co-creator Declan Lawn said: “Thanks to our amazing cast and crew, both those here and those back in Belfast.
"And thank you to the people of our home city, for letting us tell your stories – Belfast, this one’s for you.”
The former BBC Northern Ireland investigative journalist turned scriptwriter devised the show with Adam Patterson, and the pair have said its slice-of-life approach to Belfast is key to its success.
Speaking during a recent policing event at Queen’s University Belfast, Declan said the ‘central struggle’ of writing it is making a series that feels real to police officers.
Stating that Blue Lights “aspires towards some kind of authenticity”, he said: “The words ‘authentic drama’ sometimes feel like a contradiction in terms, because good television drama demands certain things and authenticity demands other things.
"It’s the central struggle of my creative life to make a police drama based here that feels authentic, even to police officers. We don't always entirely succeed in it, but we hope that we kind of capture the basic emotional truth of what it's like to be a response officer on a call sign on a difficult call.
"The first responsibility of me as a writer is to be entertaining – to grab the audience's attention and keep it, because if I don't do that then nothing else that I want to do is going to matter, because people won't be watching and the show will be cancelled.
"But if I can succeed in doing that and keep people watching, then I think what what we're trying to do in this show is an attempt to paint a portrait of a post-conflict society, with all of the compromises all of the idiosyncrasies, and all of the conflicts, that that entails.
"Now that is a tall order and it feels to me like a really big responsibility.”
The 48-year-old added that he and his co-creator were “extremely trepidatious” about making Blue Lights, as they feared its Belfast setting would have audiences switching off in droves – but they were determined to get it going, as they “saw it as an opportunity to tell a story about the whole society through response officers out there on the front line dealing with everything that's wrong".
"We could say something about a post-conflict society, about where we were going,” he said.
“Adam and I were post-conflict journalists in Northern Ireland; I think that conflict journalists count the bodies, whereas what we did was count the cost.
“We were looking at the cost of our divided society and and we thought ‘are we going to be brave or are we not’ because if we're brave, we're going to tell a story about policing with warts and all. We’re going to tell it like it is, and in doing so say something about this society.”