Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland review

A riot in Belfast in 1981

(Image credit: Chip Hires/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)

published 1 June 2023

“It’s quite a feat to leave the viewer feeling simultaneously galvanised, reflective and wrung-out, but the new five-part James Bluemel docuseries ‘Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland’ (BBC Two) manages it,” said Barbara Ellen in The Observer. Bluemel made a celebrated 2020 series about the Iraq War, and here he uses the same technique, allowing “ordinary people” to talk about their own experiences to powerful effect.

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“It’s the small things – the human, intimate things – that bring you to tears,” said Rachel Cooke in The New Statesman. Particularly moving is the interview with John, a Protestant who recalls being told as a boy that his mother had died in a car crash, only to find out later that she was alive, but had been driven away because she was (unbeknown to him) a Catholic. “His story is unfathomable, but it was the way he smoked that set me off, his body wrapped around his cigarette as if in an embrace.”