FanFare

Blue Lights follows rookie police officers working in Belfast, a city in which being a frontline response cop comes with unique pressures and dangers. The city, nominally "post-conflict" still has sectarian divides, paramilitaries running drug operations and conditions which make police work difficult. The Guardian "Don’t sleep on this fantastically tense Belfast cop show". The Spectator "The BBC’s Blue Lights is a near-perfect cop drama" First shown by the BBC March 2023 and currently available on iPlayer.
posted by rongorongo on May 2, 2023 - 4 comments

A young working-class woman named Majella navigates a constrained life in Northern Ireland sometime after "peace broke out" in Ireland in the nineties. Some things distinguish her from her fellows: she's not social at all, she's unusually sensitive to sensory input, and her grandmother was just murdered. [more inside]
posted by Sheydem-tants on Feb 21, 2021 - 1 comment

A town that claims to be home to vampire finds out that the legend is actually true. [more inside]
posted by miss-lapin on Oct 11, 2020 - 2 comments

Derry Girls is a sitcom created by Northern Irish playwright Lisa McGee for Britain’s Channel 4, about teenage travails set in the 90s against the backdrop of the Troubles. It follows the misadventures of four teenage girls (and a male British cousin also attending their Catholic school) facing the everyday challenges of growing up against the backdrop of sectarian conflict. Series 2 trailer! [more inside]
posted by anonymous on Aug 3, 2019 - 26 comments

The story of Bobby Sands, the IRA member who led the 1981 hunger strike in which Republican prisoners tried to win political status. It dramatises events in the Maze prison in the six weeks prior to Sands death. Steve McQueen directed other movies such as Shame and 12 Years a Slave.
posted by jouke on Jun 29, 2019 - 6 comments

Winner of the Man Booker Prize “Everything about this novel rings true. . . . Original, funny, disarmingly oblique and unique.”―The Guardian In an unnamed city, middle sister stands out for the wrong reasons. She reads while walking, for one. And she has been taking French night classes downtown. So when a local paramilitary known as the milkman begins pursuing her, she suddenly becomes “interesting,” the last thing she ever wanted to be. Despite middle sister’s attempts to avoid him―and to... [more inside]
posted by OHenryPacey on Jan 14, 2019 - 8 comments