From Say Nothing to Bloody Sunday: 10 brilliant TV shows that have dealt with the Troubles

Here, in chronological order, are 10 other fine examples of how TV drama – and one comedy – have tackled the conflict in Northern Ireland over the years.

Say Nothing | Official Trailer | FX

Gerald Seymour's bestselling novel was turned into this acclaimed three-part ITV thriller with Ray Lonnen as a British Army officer who goes undercover in Belfast's Catholic community to track down an IRA assassin (Derek Thompson) who murdered a UK cabinet minister.

The closing title song, Theme from Harry's Game, became an unexpected hit for Clannad. It's the only song sung entirely in Irish to crack the UK singles chart, where it reached number five.

Graham Reid's trilogy of BBC plays – Too Late to Talk to Billy, A Matter of Choice for Billy and A Coming to Terms for Billy – set Kenneth Branagh as the titular character, a conflicted young Belfast man, on the road to a glittering career on stage and screen.

The plays depicted the tensions within a working-class Protestant family, particularly between Billy and his volatile father (an excellent James Ellis), and how the ever-present shadow of sectarian violence exacerbated them.

An early collaboration between Channel 4 and RTÉ, this gripping six-part thriller stars Peter Barkworth, who devised it, as a businessman whose wife (Harriet Walter) and young stepdaughter (future Good Morning Britain presenter Susanna Reid) are kidnapped by a rogue IRA gang.

The leader of the gang is played by Derek Thompson, making his second appearance as an IRA man in this list. No wonder he took up residence in Casualty.

Only 38 minutes long and shot on grainy 16mm film, producer Danny Boyle and director Alan Clarke's BBC NI film coldly depicts 18 murders, drawn from real police reports.

With no dialogue, plot, narrative, character development, music or emotional cues for the audience, all that's left is the savage, unrelenting violence. The cumulative effect is extraordinarily powerful.

Jim Sheridan's In the Name of the Father was the bigger, splashier production, but Canadian-born director Frank Cvitanovich's excellent TV film, produced by RTÉ, got there three years earlier.

It tells the story of Giuseppe Conlon, father of Gerry, who was sentenced to 12 years in prison after being wrongfully implicated as one of the Maguire Seven, through the letters he sent to his wife Sarah. Barry McGovern and Stella McCusker are superb as the couple.

Granada Television's gripping docudrama about its flagship current affairs series World in Action's tireless investigation into the wrongful arrest and conviction of the Birmingham Six. It sparked huge controversy and establishment hostility.

The cast included John Hurt as journalist Chris Mullin and Martin Shaw as World in Action's producer/deputy editor Ian McBride, who both campaigned for years to prove the men, who were imprisoned in 1975, were innocent. The Six were exonerated and released in 1991.

James Nesbitt gives a career-best performance in 'Bloody Sunday'

ITV's two-part drama about the 1984-86 Stalker Inquiry into the shooting, allegedly without warning, of six terrorist suspects in Northern Ireland in 1982 by a special unit of the RUC.

Jack Shepherd played DCC John Stalker and it marked the drama directing debut of Peter Kosminsky (Wolf Hall).

Paul Greengrass hit the Hollywood jackpot with his hugely entertaining Jason Bourne movies, but this searing 90-minute TV film about the Bloody Sunday massacre, made by Granada Television for ITV and given a limited cinema release, is his masterwork.

Greengrass's handheld camera style lends a documentary-like feel to it, and James Nesbitt gives a career-best performance as SDLP politician Ivan Cooper, who led the fateful civil rights march.

Nesbitt again, this time playing opposite Liam Neeson. This TV film from Downfall director Oliver Hirschbiegel was made for BBC2 but given a cinema release in some territories.

A blend of historical fact and complete fiction, it features Nesbitt as a man who agrees to a television appearance with the former UVF cell leader (Neeson), long out of prison and reformed, who murdered his brother in front of him 33 years before. He carries a knife with him, bent on revenge rather than reconciliation.

The genius of Lisa McGee's sharp, warm-hearted sitcom about a group of Catholic teenage school friends in Derry in the mid-90s lay not in how it foregrounded the Troubles, but in how it refused to foreground them.

Based on McGee's own experiences, you were never unaware of the violence and tragedy. Yet it was kept in the background much of the time, breaking through intermittently in snippets of real TV and radio news broadcasts.

This made those moments of seriousness amid the comedy antics all the more affecting.