Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland

James Bluemel's Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland aired on BBC Two and BBC iPlayer across May and June 2023 and won the BAFTA for Best Factual Series 2024 alongside the Royal Television Society Award for Best Documentary Series the same year. The five-part documentary commemorated the twenty-fifth anniversary of the April 1998 Good Friday Agreement and consolidated Bluemel, after his earlier Once Upon a Time in Iraq, as one of the most distinguished contemporary British documentary directors.

Twenty-five years after the Good Friday Agreement, the series sits down with people from every side of the Troubles, former IRA volunteers, former Loyalist paramilitaries, former British soldiers and intelligence officers, civil-rights activists, civilian victims of the violence, and the broader Northern Irish post-Troubles community, for sustained extended-interview testimony of what the years between 1968 and 1998 had actually been like to live through. The series's format relies almost entirely on direct first-person interviews, with substantial use of period-archival footage as visual support.

The series became one of the most internationally consequential pieces of recent British documentary television. Bluemel's commitment to a non-prescriptive editorial approach (letting interview subjects from radically different political positions speak for themselves without authorial framing) produced one of the most carefully calibrated extended documentary works in recent prestige-television history. The series's continuing reach in subsequent Northern Irish political-cultural discourse has been substantial.