'Blue Lights' -- Susan Price
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| 'Allo, 'allo, 'allo |
I'd heard of the series. I'd heard it was good. But I'd never watched it because, well, I didn't feel like learning a whole new set of characters and their setting and the whole malarkey.
The clip showed a woman police officer asking a tetchy male householder about the domestic violence call from his house. He kept trying to brush the whole thing aside and get her to leave. She kept on insistently repeating her question, to his obviously growing annoyance.
Some readers may recognise the scene. It was very brief-- it was a Facebook clip-- but in that short time, the writing, the acting and the editing established themselves as way above the usual standard.
The series was Blue Lights. The next time I was near a tv-set, I went to BBC iplayer and started from series one, part one. (I haven't caught up with the scene mentioned above at the time of writing.)
This whole blog is just a salute to the writers, the actors, the directors, the editors who worked and work on that series. It is so good.
It's not a series where you can relax, sure in the knowledge that your favourite character(s) will survive. Any little incident can move with rapidity to violence, and not flashy, heroic violence either, but the scrappy, nasty, dirty street kind.
The characters you've registered as kindly, salt-of-the-earth types will often reveal a nasty streak-- while hardened criminals reveal a social-conscience of a kind.
I gather it's won all kind of awards. It deserves every one.
I have no idea whether this kind of quality is due more to the insight and story-telling skills of the writers... or to the skill of the actors who take the script and make it live... or to the director who gives them a lead... or to the editors who decide when to cut away from a scene. Or if they all had to work as a team to produce this kind of quality. It's astonishing.
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