Blue Lights co-creator Declan Lawn on 'massive responsibility of telling Belfast's stories'

Making television drama is a highly speculative enterprise. You hope that the project you’re working on will resonate with audiences, and sometimes in the quiet of the edit suite you even convince yourself that it will. But you can never be sure. When we were making the first series of Blue Lights, we had several moments as a production team when we felt that we might have something good on our hands.

The first rough cuts of scenes involving Siân Brooke, who plays Grace, and Martin McCann, who plays Stevie, had an undeniable warmth and chemistry. The younger actors, Katherine Devlin (Annie) and Nathan Braniff (Tommy) seemed to leap off the screen. And then, of course, there was Gerry, the loveable rogue and veteran cop who had seen it all; Richard Dormer’s performance was magnificent, and reminded people that he’s one of the finest actors in these islands. 

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Even so, as broadcast approached, we knew that all of this might count for nothing. After all Blue Lights is a drama that revels in the hyper-locality of post-conflict Northern Ireland. It doesn’t compromise in terms of setting, or dialogue, or context. It assumes knowledge that most of the audience just won’t have. People might just not like the show. They simply might not get it. As creative risks go, it was a pretty massive one. On the night the show first broadcast, I was walking up and down my kitchen, as nervous as I had ever been, as my family watched it in the living room. I tried to avoid social media, but couldn’t resist the odd glance at Twitter. Some people liked it, some didn’t. OK, I thought, fine. 

I paced some more, and the phone rang. It was Adam Patterson, my co-writer and the co-creator of Blue Lights. He lives five minutes away from me in Belfast.

“Are you watching the show go out?”

“No. I’m walking up and down the kitchen trying not to faint. You?”

“Same.”

A pause. 

“Do you fancy a pint?”

“Yes. Very much so.”

Twenty minutes later, we were sitting at the bar in our local pub. The show was still on air. We weren’t saying much. I looked at my watch. 10.01pm. 

“Well, episode one is finished,” I said. 

Adam nodded silently. My phone beeped. My wife had just sent me our first review. It was from The Guardian. I looked at it, but then had to look again.  It was a five-star review. I was about to tell Adam this momentous news, but he was engrossed in his own phone. 

“The Telegraph just gave the show a five-star review,” he said.

“You mean The Guardian,” I replied.

“No, I mean The Telegraph.”

We looked at one another. Our phones were buzzing every couple of seconds now, messages from friends and family and people we hadn’t seen in years. We sat there in silence, both of us simultaneously aware that this would be one of those moments in life that you never forget. We had no idea what it would mean. 

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Fuelled by those early reviews, Blue Lights went on to become a word-of-mouth success, if in these modern times you are willing to include social media under the umbrella term “word of mouth”. The BBC’s social media marketing team did a great job of curating specific clips from the show and dropping them on platforms like Instagram and TikTok.

As people gravitated towards the show on BBC iPlayer, they would tag their friends, and drop their own clips in WhatsApp groups, and the audience grew and grew. More people watched the show on iPlayer than on terrestrial TV, and a great many of them binged all the episodes over a couple of days; a significant sign of the times. 

For Adam and me, and Stephen Wright and Louise Gallagher, who co-created and produced the show, the next few months felt like being on a theme park ride, both exhilarating and vertiginous. People we would meet socially or casually wanted to talk about the show and the characters. They were upset about Gerry, or interested in Stevie and Grace, or invested in Tommy and Annie, or curious about Jen.

We started to feel like these characters we had written somehow had taken on lives outside of us. They had felt real to us as writers for over two years, but now they somehow felt real to other people too. 

Adam and I never get tired of talking about the show to whoever is interested in it, and I don’t think we ever will. Success in TV drama came to both of us when we were in our forties (I’m 47 now, and he’s 42) and so we will never take it for granted. Making Blue Lights is the greatest privilege of our lives, and we are just about old enough to know it. 

For the actors, too, life changed. Many of them were quite young and new to the profession, and they started getting recognised on the street. On more than one occasion they were pulled over by passing police patrols in Belfast, and just at the moment when they were wondering what they had done wrong, the police officers sidled up and asked them for a selfie. 

Amid this general recalibration of our lives, there was the small matter of making series two of Blue Lights. In many ways, it was less arduous than it might have been, because we always had a creative plan for multiple series, so we weren’t starting from an entirely blank slate. 

Writing series two was a bit easier because we had a strong feel now for the characters, and for the actors who were playing them. We could “see” each scene playing out in our minds in a way that we couldn’t for the first series.

That said, there are challenges to making a TV drama set in your own time, place and city – especially when that city is Belfast. So much of the present and the past is still contentious, and so many subjects are fraught with real lived trauma, and yet we wouldn’t be true to ourselves or to Blue Lights if we didn’t address them. 

In series two, for example, we have a storyline about a “legacy” case – an unsolved crime from the Troubles – that was very emotional for us to research, and to write and direct. The responsibility of telling stories like that is massive, but such things are in the DNA of Belfast, and so they have to be at the heart of Blue Lights, too.

We have to balance all of that with the duty to entertain a primetime BBC One audience; to tell stories that grab them and don’t let go. Often, creatives can be dismissive about the necessity of TV drama to entertain large numbers of people, but to us it’s crucial. When you ask people to sit down and watch your show you are borrowing their very precious time, so you’d better make it captivating, and as enjoyable as possible. 

Now that series two is finished and ready to be broadcast, Adam and I feel quite similar to how we felt this time last year. We feel we’ve made something good, that we’re proud of, and that means something to us. But once again, the audience will be the judge of that.

Will we be any less nervous this time out? Probably not.

Will we go to the pub for mutual moral support instead of watching it live on TV? That’s one storyline we may have to repeat.

Blue Lights series two is on BBC One on Monday nights at 9pm and on iPlayer.

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