THIS isn’t simply a television series; this is an event. Blue Lights (BBC1, Monday) is your best pal’s engagement party in Prague, it’s your first born’s 21st. It’s celebrating landing a new job and going down the pub and getting off with the gorgeous girl in the new dress and heels.

Don’t believe me? Look, over the years we’ve all thought that the commissioning of yet another new cop drama is as likely as anyone in blue actually turning up at your house after a burglary (even when you call and tell them that Netflix has informed you your television is now living in a new home in Clydebank).

But somehow, unlike the police force itself, the number of great cop dramas actually increases, and we can delight in the likes of Line of Duty, The Responder or Happy Valley.  Now it’s Blue Light that’s shining brightly in our living rooms, thanks to some quite beguiling writing and completely compelling characters.

The drama is set in Belfast and written by former investigative journalists Declan Lawn and Adam Patterson and the first series attracted more than seven million viewers, and really, it could have been more. Not since Z Cars has a cop show taken us inside the helmet heads to explore relationships, and just as importantly, their changing relationship with the job.

Blue Light also cleverly explores the dramatic change in perceptions of the Troubles, with a younger generation of Irish people having a distant, often remote connection with the events of the past.

If you haven’t seen the first series, binge watch it. Then build an event evening around the opener to the second. And wallow in sheer television joy acted out perfectly by the likes of Sian Brooke. 

There aren’t too many casting directors out there who will claim Danny Dyer to be a wonderful actor. But he’s authentic ain’t he? A geezer, a proper bloke who plays proper blokes, a fella who can not only look after himself but out for those close to him. But what is a proper bloke? That’s questioned in Danny Dyer: How to Be a Man (Tuesday, C4).

The Cockney actor and sometime presenter and descendant of royalty has decided to go in search of what it really means to be a man in this world today. What is it to be masculine? Is it all about Andrew Tate ugliness? We see Dyer asking questions of men about how they feel they should behave in the modern world, a chance to psychologically profile the male of today, and predict where he will be tomorrow.

But of course, the former EastEnder doesn’t quite frame it in this form. “Channel 4 have bunged me a few quid to travel the country, talking to geezers,” he says, in perfect bloke voice.

The Herald:

Danny’s not quite a legend, however. You have to have an entire evening  – the Shirley MacLaine Night (BBC4, Thursday), to merit that soubriquet. The Hollywood star, now 90, is one of the last remnants of the golden age of Hollywood, an actor who offered the full range of emotions. Could anyone else have revealed the vulnerability she suggested in Billy Wilder’s The Apartment? Or the sexiness of her nun in Two Mules for Sister Sara? The evening’s highlight is the Talking Pictures segment, but there is also a great interview with Parkinson who claimed she was ‘an expert in wrong-footing an interviewer.’

Another opportunity to step back in time to visit classic Hollywood emerges with Feud: Capote vs The Swans, (Disney +, from Wednesday).  It makes us admit what we love about Tinseltown is hearing the lovely, heartwarming old stories, of bitching, backstabbing and treachery. And one of the masters of this dark art was writer Truman Capote.

Indeed, the brilliance of the In Cold Blood writer was often overshadowed by his talent for reducing his prey to a bleeding carcass, which he would then dump by the side of the road.

Capote was once part of a group of socialites he nicknamed The  Swans, elite New York women who lived the high life, and Capote, a gay man, was included in this group, even invited to go on holiday with them, thanks to his talent for writing such as Breakfast at Tiffany’s - and an ability to provide stiletto sharp gossip.

But Truman’s talent for scandal mongering was so practised and powerful he couldn’t help himself, and came to see The Swans as one great lake of opportunity to go fishing in. It was a huge mistake. The US may not have a Royal family, but it has created its own version, and Swans were very much part of the very privileged, powerful elite. Capote played a dangerous game in playing these women off amongst each other, a tactic which was seen as delicious by the American media and the person in the street, but it created carnage for the writer himself.

The cast is almost as special as Capote’s talent. Tom Hollander plays the writer, while Naomi Watts features as his best friend Barbara Paley. And with so much libelling, slanderous invective to play with you know they’ll be wonderfully vicious.