It’s over, hi... So, did Derry Girls live up to its promise?
As season one of the surprise comedy hit series comes to an end, did the gang leave us with a smile on our faces?
AS the last strains of The Cranberries’ Dreams rang out at last night, an air of depression descended upon Derry.
For the city’s beloved Derry Girls series ‘wan’ was over.
Over the last six weeks families gathered around the TV at 10pm in a manner more reminiscent of the age of the wireless radio to laugh and wonder what the world thought of our accents and quirks now that writer Lisa McGee had shone a light on us.
A unique dialect, with words so parochial they were not uttered nor understood beyond the city’s walls, were now being freely repeated the land over. Celebs told each other to stop having “cack attacks”.
And even fictional Ethiopian boy Kamal, who Claire dedicated her 24-hour fast to, was almost made a national hero after he was nominated for the very real 2017 Donegal Person of the Year award.
Derry Girls gave people from beyond our shores a unique and hilarious insight into life here.
Where once they viewed Derry in grainy black and white footage after yet another atrocity, the effervescent and foulmouthed Michelle exploded onto their screens in technicolour with a big fat “What’s up motherf ****** ?”
It would be hard to pinpoint the finest moments of the first series.
It might have been the time Erin’s Ma tied the friends to the radiators above Fionnuala’s Chip Shop with their own shoelaces to fake an armed robbery so she wouldn’t impose a chip ban on the family.
It could have been the time Da “went up Pump Street with a cream horn”, an episode that resulted in hundreds taking selfies in the city’s Pump Street with their own bakery-bought creamed delicacy.
It could also have been the time the girls looked to Mary for divine help in the history exam and became the “muthaf ****** Children of Fatima” after witnessing a weeping apparition.
Or the finest moment could have been every single time Michelle opened her mouth.
From calling everyone “d***s” to her explanation of the Famine — “We’ve got the gist, we ran out of spuds and everyone was raging” — she stole every scene.
No one knows how they filled that half hour on a Thursday night before Derry Girls.
No ones knows how they will in the future, or how they will actually cope, for it was sweet and funny and raw and real.
As the closing credits loomed, the show reflected the stark reality of teenage life here.
For as the streets outside the windows burned, the girls’ thoughts were of only each other, of friendship, of fun and of “not being a d***”.
Those Derry Girls rampaged over everything the outside world thought this place ever was.
And I, for “wan”, “cannae” wait for series two.