Blue Light Spells Danger:Blue Lights.

"There's enough bad things in life that'll come looking for you. You don't need to go looking for them" - Gerry Cliff 

"Police and thieves in the street fighting the nation with their guns and ammunition" - Police and Thieves, Junior Murvin

Yet another gritty police drama! You'd think that after three series of Happy Valley, six series of Line of Duty, and one of The Responder our appetites for cops, both bent and decent, and their messy lives would have been well and truly sated. But ... it seems it hasn't.

Blue Lights (BBC1/iPlayer, created by Declan Lawn and Adam Patterson, directed by Gilles Bannier) doesn't particularly alter the formula we've become familiar with - but it is a very well made, gripping, thrilling, take on it. It's a great watch.

Three rookie police officers are on probation on the mean streets of Belfast. It's not going particularly well for any of them. Grace (Sian Brooke) is an English woman who's lived in Belfast for twenty years. A single mum, her son Cal (Matt Carver) is having a hard time because he's mixed race but Grace can't see that because she's so immersed in her work.

An ex-social worker she's idealistic and caring but is that perhaps a little naive in the context of being a police woman in Northern Ireland? Stevie (Martin McCann) who's tasked with showing Grace the ropes certainly seems to think so. Although Stevie doesn't give much away about himself except that he's fan of The Bonnevilles and that he likes eating gravadlax for lunch.

Annie (Katherine Devlin) is younger than Grace. She turns up to work with a hangover, she's streetwise, and she's even a little bit cynical. But then she's a Catholic who competes at hurling and Catholics who compete at hurling don't, as a rule, join the Police Service of Northern Ireland. The one that used to be called the Royal Ulster Constabulary.

The third of the rookies is Tommy (Nathan Braniff). Tommy is university educated (he studied criminology), academically minded, and very eager to succeed but he's a terrible shot with a gun and if he can't improve his shooting he won't pass his probation. His mentor is hard bitten but kind and generous Gerry Cliff (Richard Dormer), a big fan of Kris Kristofferson and Johnny Cash. Two artists Tommy has never even heard of.

Then there's Jen (Hannah McClean). The daughter of a senior officer who is being fast tracked into a senior police position. She's selfish and lazy and she's also a coward. She'll do almost anything not to get involved in proper police work preferring to stay in a nice warm office filing reports. It's hard to like Jen and her sense of entitlement but over six hour long episodes her character is, eventually, fleshed out and you begin to understand her motivations a little better.

As well as the usual police issues of drunkenness, domestic abuse, and people waving knives around in the street, the Belfast of Blue Lights is a city that lives in fear of the McIntyre family, a republican criminal gang in every sense. Headed up by Eric Cantona lookalike James McIntyre (John Lynch) with his son Mo (Michael Shea), a truly nasty piece of work - sometimes too much even for his own father, and young joyrider/petty criminal Gordy Mackle (Dane Whyte O'Hara) acting as his enforcers.

The McIntyre's seem untouchable. They attack police and claim to be victims, they administer 'punishment beatings', they deal drugs, and they even shoot up their own houses to distract police from more serious wrongdoings elsewhere. When Gordy's mum Angela (Valene Kane), a woman with mental health issues, starts worrying about Gordy's involvement with the McIntyres the police dismiss her and her family as 'frequent flyers', people who so regularly in trouble with the law that they are essentially beyond help.

Some of the police, like Sergeant Helen McNally (Joanne Crawford) who takes Annie under her wing, are essentially good but others seem a little too up themselves. Inspector David 'Jonty' Johnston (Jonathan Harden) being a prime example. Jonty seems to be forever in the process of dishing out a bollocking and he doesn't take any shit from anyone.

Or at least not from anyone below him in the food chain. It's a different matter when we see him meet with MI5 officer Joseph (Nabil Elouahabi). Joseph's not happy about something but we're not sure exactly what that is. He makes demands of Jonty, threatens him, and stops him from being able to carry out his job properly. Has he got something on? What does he want from him?

Something is clearly afoot higher up. What are the 'sneaky beakies' (undercover police) from the mainland doing in Belfast? Why is the palace (a centre for kids coming out of care which acts as a stepping stone back into society) so quiet? There's a lot of strange stuff happening and soon a lot of new characters start to appear which help tell the story but as I'm not in the business of spoilers I won't go any further.

Of course there are balaclavas, whiskey, and appointment shootings (all the Irish cliches ticked off pretty easily) and there are car chases, drug overdoses, and women being punched in the face - and spat on - by men but there's also a story of a cop who shat himself at work when a firework went off and was so mortified he resigned immediately and moved to Australia and there's even a very brief blast of Where's Me Jumper by The Sultans Of Ping FC.

There's tension between the uniformed police and the sneaky beakies and there are more than a few references to the sectarian nature of Northern Irish society. The police check under their cars each morning for bombs, young lads on pushbikes call them 'peelers', kids throw bottles at police cars in predominantly Catholic housing estates, and then there's the murals and a framed photo gallery in the police station containing images of OUR MURDERED COLLEAGUES.

There are good supporting performances from Andi Osho as desk Sergeant Sandra Cliff (Gerry's wife), Packy Lee (Peaky Blinders' Johnny Dogs) as a man whose son the McIntyres come for, and Alan Jenkins as a damaged, but well meaning, local eccentric called Happy Kelly. There's been talk recently about shows like Happy Valley being 'copaganda' (trying to promote a positive image of the police when recent high profile cases have shown the Met, particularly, to be riddled with rapists and murderers) but I don't think you could accuse Blue Lights of copaganda. The police in Blue Lights are nuanced, human, and fallible as much as they may be idealistic, officious, or conflicted.

Pushed along by Eion O'Callaghan and Elmo Orkestra's haunting score, Blue Lights is tense, even paranoid in places, it's sometimes eerie, it can be moving and sad, and, at times, it can be utterly horrific but it's never ever boring. As things move on it turns out that almost everybody in it is in some way interlinked in ways that are not initially obvious. As well as police and thieves it looks at racism, bullying, nepotism, parental pressures, and loneliness and it never offers answers. It always asks questions.

Questions about the cultural differences between different age groups and classes, questions about how some people seem to be above the law or at least how the law is applied differently to different sections of society, questions about how police decisions at every level of the hierarchy are subject to endless compromise, and questions about how the spectres of a violent history of an area can be passed down through the generations and how the sins of the father are eventually played out by the son. A blood oath written in Belfast's very unique, and tragic, history.