Blue Lights

I’m happy to tell you that the quality remains sky-high for series three. .... The first episode is a scene-setter, and it gets better with every instalment.

By the end, you will have a real fondness for these characters. Blue Lights won’t receive a fraction of the hype of Line of Duty, but there isn’t a duff line or an overcooked scene to be found here. The various storylines knit together into one satisfying conclusion.

Blue Lights might settle into being just another standard police procedural. In the meantime, however, it remains the best cop show on British TV.

We also see the force being stretched to breaking point: fewer coppers on the ground, having to double as mental-health experts. The story is still warming up, but this is dense, rich soil, and these are the perfect writers to till it.

By the time the credits roll, though, any Grace/Stevie shippers have been smacked around the head by a wisely observed reality check about what the pair’s relationship is really based on. In hard times, Blue Lights continues to skip deftly between light and dark.

Sincerity and earnestness are potent storytelling tools when deployed correctly, and those qualities were front and centre here. At a time when every police show feels like an action movie on a shoestring, Blue Lights managed to stand out from the crowd.

The main weakness in all of this is that the police trainees are so useless that you don’t actually want them to succeed. .... What the writers, Declan Lawn and Adam Patterson, do get very right is the sense of sheer exhausting frustration of policing a place where the usual challenges are overlaid with ethnic-national hatreds and the ever-present possibility of assassination.