Blue Lights (BBC1)
Cops eat doughnuts. Coppers eat cake. That’s the distinction between US and UK police — same ethos, different recipes, that’s all.
On the streets of Belfast, as the crime drama Blue Lights returned, PCs Stevie and Grace (Martin McCann and Sian Brooke) were bonding over a bake during a quiet moment on patrol.
She unclipped her Tupperware box suggestively and urged him to try a slice of ‘fifteen’.
The Beeb has a grand wee tradition of policemen from Northern Ireland — Adrian Dunbar as Line Of Duty’s Supt Hastings, James Nesbitt’s morally ambiguous DCI Brannick in Bloodlands, all the way back to James Ellis as PC Bert Lynch in Z Cars.
But none of them, as far as I can recall, ever tucked into a wedge of fifteen on screen.
They must have eaten it when they were growing up — it’s a favourite of Ulster schoolchildren.
On the streets of Belfast , as the crime drama Blue Lights returned, PCs Stevie and Grace (Martin McCann and Sian Brooke, pictured) were bonding over a bake during a quiet moment on patrol
The Beeb has a grand wee tradition of policemen from Northern Ireland — Adrian Dunbar as Line Of Duty ‘s Supt Hastings, James Nesbitt ‘s morally ambiguous DCI Brannick in Bloodlands. Pictured: Nathan Braniff and Katherine Devlin in Blue Lights
Come to that, I’d love to see it served up on Bake Off, just to witness Paul and Prue’s reactions. There’s no actual baking involved, you see.
Take 15 crushed digestive biscuits, 15 chopped marshmallows and 15 sliced glace cherries, and mix with a teacup of condensed milk.
Roll the mixture into a log, coat with dessicated coconut and chill for a few hours.
Then slice it like a jam roly poly. That’s fifteen. And don’t say this column never teaches you anything.
If Blue Lights runs for long enough, eventually the BBC will be able to publish a recipe book as a spin-off.
In the first season last year, Stevie’s vol au vents were a particular success, though he hasn’t yet persuaded Grace to start dating him.
Now he’s trying too hard, acting the alpha male to keep her out of danger on call-outs.
That backfired when they responded to an alarm at a chemist’s: Stevie sent Grace to a side door and, while he was marooned in aisles of sticking plasters and mouthwash, she was confronting a junkie with a knife in the back of the shop.
Soaring drugs crime on the city streets is the theme for the uniformed officers (‘peelers’, in Belfast slang) on Blue Lights this time round.
Stevie and Grace had already found a homeless heroin addict dead from an overdose, while the unit’s new man-on-a-mission, DS Canning (Desmond Eastwood) was enlisting rookie PC Tommy Foster (Nathan Braniff) to bring down a drugs baron and former terrorist gangster.
Stevie and Grace had already found a homeless heroin addict dead from an overdose, while the unit’s new man-on-a-mission, DS Canning (Desmond Eastwood) was enlisting rookie PC Tommy Foster (Nathan Braniff, pictured) to bring down a drugs baron and former terrorist gangster
While the era of the Troubles is over, there’s a brooding sense that sectarian pressures are still bubbling below the surface.
A similar hangover from past events makes some scenes in Blue Lights difficult to follow.
If you don’t have total recall of last year’s series, you’re going to wonder who Tina (Abigail McGibbon) is, in her high-heeled boots.
The touchiness of PC Annie Conlon (Katherine Devlin) isn’t clearly explained either.
Don’t fret too much about the plot, and just enjoy the cake. As Clint Eastwood nearly said in the crime classic Dirty Harry, ‘Go ahead — bake my day.’
