“It’s always important in every season to shift up the show and make it feel different – Belfast is like a patchwork quilt of stories”
Blue Lights is finally back on our screens next week for the highly anticipated third series and the creators have said that this is their “most ambitious series yet”.
Declan Lawn and Adam Patterson, the duo behind the hit Belfast cop drama, are taking viewers to South Belfast this time for a look into the seedy underworld of ‘middle-class crime’ when it returns on September 29.
Speaking at a Blue Lights set visit back in March, Adam and Declan shared a taste of what is to come for our young officers two years into the job, why they think Blue Lights 3 is their favourite series yet and.
READ MORE: Blue Lights writers say viewers can expect ‘most emotional’ series yetREAD MORE: Watch: Trailer released for series three of BBC’s Blue Lights
Declan said: “Season three, as usual, is drawn from real life quite alot – the research period for this season was a bit longer, about three months or so, where we talked to about 30 police officers of various ranks.
“This is probably, in my opinion, our most ambitious series yet in terms of what we’re talking about and what we’re showing and doing.
“We’ve moved the focus a bit, as we did in series two, so the criminal arc and storyline of this series is about middle-class crime.
“It’s about the professional apparatus around organised crime and at the centre of it are a lawyer and an accountant who are complicit in supporting organised crime and are drawn in way over their heads.”
They said that we can expect some darker moments than the previous two series as the officers deal with some difficult topics, but as always, it will be balanced with the humour and solidarity Blue Lights is praised for.
“It’s always important in every season to shift up the show and make it feel different – Belfast is like a patchwork quilt of stories and we didn’t want to continuously concentrate on working-class areas as that’s not the truth of what the police are dealing with,” Declan continued.
“We’re looking at things like how the middle-class appetite for cocaine affects the whole city and police. We’re looking at organised crime in terms of drug distribution and we’re also looking at child sex exploitation and cross-border trafficking.
“All of these themes that come up and all the kind of criminal things that come up are drawn directly from real life. Blue Lights has always been and always will be a confluence of the journalism that we used to do and turning it into drama – it’s just how Adam and I like to work.”
Adam said that the interconnection between crimes in all classes of society plays a massive role in the new season, shining a light on what goes on behind the electronic gates in front of fancy houses.
“There is obviously that classic hypocrisy where it’s very easy to judge other people because their lives might not seem as adequate as ours,” he explained.
“And yet, as Declan said, the middle classes are spearheading more drug trafficking through Northern Ireland than anyone else. It seemed like the obvious choice and South Belfast had been on our radar from season one.
“It’s a small city here in many ways and you’ll see that in this season – there’s a lot of interconnection.”
Adam explained that having series four already commissioned while writing series 3 allowed them “more liberty and freedom” as they haven’t had to tie up a season in the final episode.
He said: “You are given the confidence that it is coming back so you can draw on a much greater canvas with twice the time – we found that really liberating.
“You can also, which may or may not happen, bring people back towards the end of the season in the knowledge that they will have a much greater role in the next season.
“It does give a bit more creative freedom to do that and surprise people a bit.”
An important theme Adam and Declan wanted to bring to the forefront of Blue Lights 3 is undiagnosed trauma police officers experience, as highlighted to them by real-life PSNI officers they spoke to in research.
Declan explained: “We’re always reading and hearing on the radio stories about officers off with mental health claims and there always seems to me to be a kind of inference in that they are kind of malingering or it’s not valid or justified.
“As I sat in front of a lot of officers this year, they were telling me stories about things they had seen and things that deeply affected them – some of those officers had received proper help, some of them hadn’t and some of them, by their own choice, hadn’t.”
The duo wanted to explore what carrying trauma does to an officer in both their personal and professional lives, which will be shown through the character of Aisling in Blue Lights 3 – taking on a much larger role than previous series, producing “really moving and really important” representation on the screen.
Declan concluded: “I feel this is the most ambitious series emtionally but also in terms of some of the action and stunts we are trying to portray and the threat the officers are facing – I feel like it’s all gone up a gear and hopefully audiences will think that too.”
The new series of Blue Lights starts on Monday 29 September on BBC One at 9pm, with the full series available on iPlayer from 6am that morning
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