Hot Shots 2026: Connor Richmond

When Blue Lights co-creator Louise Gallagher was assembling the writing room for the BBC police drama, alongside Two Cities Television’s creative director Steven Wright, Connor Richmond was the first person she brought on board, as a trainee script editor.

Having started out on Emmerdale as a script supervisor’s floor assistant and third assistant director, Connor had moved home to Belfast and made the leap to scripted development. Gallagher has worked with him on several low-budget shorts and features over the past decade.

“Connor’s aptitude for story and production is built in,” she says. “It’s been a joy watching him grow as a person and producer.”

Connor has since been assistant script editor for Joe Barton’s Sky series Amadeus and development and production script editor on RTÉ & ITV Studios’ The Yank, and sits on the committee of the Belfast Media Festival.

He was also the creative force behind So You’re Going to Die, a short proof-of-concept film starring James Nesbitt and written by the late Michael Patrick and Oisín Kearney. Praised for its rawness, sincerity and distinctiveness, it’s now in development as a feature film.

Connor’s packed a lot into the first phase of his career: supervising the multi-language post-production pipelines on children’s animations made by Belfast’s Paper Owl Films; working a script reader for productions companies including Mammoth Films; and a variety of production coordination and script editor and secretary roles on feature films and a Hallmark Christmas movie.

He also runs Dogleap Productions, making short films Fleeting and Erin and dual English-Irish language animation Reroot, which starred Siobhán McSweeney and played at 14 festivals, and developing a TV series adaptation of David A. Dunlop’s novels The Broken Fiddle and A Maid Again.

Gallagher says Connor ”works incredibly hard, wanting to succeed”. On a short film the pair executive produced together, she says, Connor was ”the driving creative force behind the project and when he experienced difficulties due to adverse weather conditions and technical problems, he didn’t panic, [instead] putting his head down and guiding it through to completion”.

She adds: ”I’ve no doubt Connor will do great things - and in my eyes, he’s always been a Hot Shot. That’s why I work with him at every opportunity.”