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Green Light for Blue Lights


In my last post about the 4 Corners Festival I made reference brief reference to Tyree Patton, the UU Masters Journalism student hosting our evening with "Blue Light's" creators Declan Lawn and Adam Patterson... She did a superb job, despite her nervousness at having a number of seasoned journalists as well as the two on stage with her... 
What I should have done, before recommending that you look up her interview on catch up was to issue a HUGE SPOILER ALERT!!! A key plot point was repeatedly referred to in the interview, and the subsequent Q&A, so if you haven't seen the first series yet, do yourself a major favour and go watch Series 1 before both the interview and Series 2 appears within the next month or so, with the BBC releasing photos and cast from it over the past weekend.
As Patterson and Lawn say in the interview, there is no shortage of cop shows on TV, and Northern Ireland produces more than its fair share with "The Fall", "Line of Duty", the execrable "Bloodlands" and the Ballykissangel-light "Hope Street" as well as "Blue Lights." Given that the theme for our week this year was "Our Stories: Towards a Culture of Hope" you might have thought we would have chosen to focus on "Hope Street" - but as one colleague put it "It's a complete fantasy - no-one has ever seen as much sunshine or as many Catholics in Donaghadee!!!"
But all of us on the planning committee who had seen "Blue Lights" agreed from the start that it was the sort of show we wanted to feature in our festival. Not just because of the link mentioned in the interview between Father Martin Magill and their first black comedic short "Rough" which they kindly allowed us to show in our lockdown Festival in 2021, but because of something deeper. As we noted in the introduction to a later event, "The Stories that Shape Us" Nigerian/British poet and novelist Ben Okri once said that 
“Stories are the secret reservoir of values: change the stories individuals and nations live by and tell themselves, and you change the individuals and nations.”
A well-told televisual story has the potential to change hearts and minds and attitudes. And that is explicitly what Patterson and Lawn set out to do in "Blue Lights," using their respective journalistic skills with pictures and words to weave a complex story about the police, who, despite the Patton reforms are still not entirely acceptable in all corners of our city. But this is more than a "cop show" - it is about broader issues about what sort of a society we want in this part of the world - not least the dynamic between pragmatism and idealism that the interviewees refer to, working itself out in the front seat of Stevie and Grace's patrol car. We need both in our civic and political discourse if we are to mature as a society, and it could be argued that the return of Stormont last week was a perfect example of both in play.
I'm looking forward to series 2, which, rumour has it, takes the action from predominantly in the west into my childhood corner in the east... So it will be good to play a game of "location bingo." But I trust there will be a series 3 and 4, to make this a truly 4 Corners series and touch on other important issues for our society...
Selah
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