Hot TV CHOICE With Mike Ward

Since screeching onto our screens last year, BLUE LIGHTS (9pm, BBC One) has proved itself a cop show with a difference.

Rookie ‘peelers’ (slang for cops) Grace, Annie and Tommy are policing neighbourhoods where the legacy of the Troubles still looms large, and the fact that bobbies carry guns says a lot about tensions that remain in Belfast. Any situation has the potential to turn ugly quickly, and frequently does. It certainly makes Blue Lights more pulse-pounding than the day-to-day cop action of The Bill and bloodless whodunits like Death in Paradise.

The second series is keeping us hooked with its turf war between loyalist gangs, but the gritty policing is softened by soapier plots about coppers in love. Tonight, PC Stevie (Martin McCann), the widower who has a crush on his sidekick Grace (Siân Brooke), is forced to confront his past when they’re called to a heartbreaking case.

Martin Clunes may have left picturesque Cornwall behind as Doc Martin, but he quickly wangled another job in an even more glorious location.

In the final episode of MARTIN CLUNES: ISLANDS OF THE PACIFIC (9pm, ITV1), the actor swans around Micronesia, a collection of 600 paradise island nations full of glorious sandy beaches and waving palms.

Of course, Martin finds out what challenges the islanders face and discovers that on Guam, the locals have been battling a snake introduced to the island in the last century that has wiped out almost the whole bird population. Now they’re trying to reintroduce native birds and reduce the snake numbers.