Blue Lights
Blue Lights star Siân Brooke knows all about the realities of being a police officer – her father was one
Monday 9.00pm BBC1
IT WAS A Belfast taxi driver who first let Siân Brooke know that, in Blue Lights, she had a hit on her hands. She stars as social worker turned trainee constable Grace in the Northern Ireland police drama set and filmed in the city and now returning for its second series. “We’d just had the screening in Belfast of the first episode and I got into a cab to go back to the airport,” she remembers. “I got chatting with the driver, and I told him I’d just done this job, although I didn’t tell him I was in it. When I explained what it was, he said, ‘I’ ll not be watching that. I don’t like those shows. I don’t like the cops’. I asked him to give it a go, and he said, ‘OK, I’ll record it on the videotape’.
“Then, when it went out, he sent me a message on Instagram to say, ‘I’ve watched it and I love it’. And he offered me free taxi rides whenever I’m in Belfast!”
For Brooke, this sealed her conviction that, in Blue Lights, she and her colleagues have created something special. “We are proud of it, but I was apprehensive in terms of how it might go down, whether a Northern Ireland audience would embrace it and feel it represented them. That’s what’s been overwhelming. People come up and say, ‘I don’t normally watch dramas about my home town. They don’t truly represent it. But I watch this’.”
With two more series of Blue Lights already commissioned, Brooke is braced for long stretches away from her husband, Bill Buckhurst, and their two young sons Ben and Archie at home in south-west London: “I go over to Belfast and do Monday to Friday for about four months and they visit in school holidays. I always strive to be organised and I always fall short. Maybe I should accept my haphazardness. There’s lots of juggling. My husband is a director so between us, we both have mad, unpredictable professions.”
Brooke previously starred in Trying and Doctor Foster – but got her big break in the final series of Sherlock opposite Benedict Cumberbatch as Holmes’s secret sister, Eurus. Does she like being recognised? “Not really. I’ve been very fortunate. I have always had the chance to play different characters with different looks, which means I’ve gone under the radar quite a lot. I can always go down the shop for a pint of milk.”
She laughs remembering the frenzy of joining Sherlock at the peak of its popularity in 2017: “It was so clandestine that even my agent, when she told me I’d got the job, couldn’t tell me in her office. She had to go outside to speak to me.”
BROOKE WAS KEPT deliberately in the dark by the show’s c
