Derry Girls The hit comedy series is back! Donal O’Donoghue sets the scene for the eagerly-awaited arrival of season two
Last year Derry Girls gave us an alternative Ulster. Set amid the re and brimstone of e Troubles, Lisa McGee’s TV comedy chronicled the picaresque adventures of four convent school girls (and one wee English chap) as they negotiated that most treacherous of terrain, the terrible teens. If it echoed other sources or re ected familiar landscapes - Malory Towers on speed, the comic book anarchy of Father Ted, the cutting wit of its home town – Derry Girls was very much its own thing, sisters doing it for themselves, the Spice Girls with funny accents, teenage kicks on Foyleside. It’s the 1990s and Babylon may be burning but these girls (and one boy) just want to have fun. Last week the much anticipated second season of this global hit (from Channel 4 to Net ix) was announced with the line that “the girls were back!” At the red carpet premiere at the Guildhall, the cast and McGee were giving little away. “It’s against the backdrop of the beginnings of the peace process this time, but the gang are very much still getting in and out of trouble and still trying to grow up – not very successfully,” said the writer. But we do know that Bill Clinton’s 1995 visit to Derry will feature, that Ardal O’Hanlon is in the ensemble playing “the awkward, middle-aged mummy’s boy of the Quinn/McCool extended family” and already the phrase “craic killer” is set to be the new buzz word.
I spoke with Lisa McGee last autumn. By then she had an armful of awards including Best Comedy Series at the Edinburgh TV Festival and a brace of IFTAs, was listed by the Radio Times as the 11th most powerful person in TV in the UK. Her hometown was experiencing its own mini tourism revival on the success of the series with a Derry Girls walking tour and e Bogside Stores (used frequently in the series) permanently renamed as Dennis’s Wee Shop. en at the end of January a dramatic
Northern Ireland’s funniest export since Kevin McAleer (and he’s in it!) is back on the box. The IRA might be talking ceasefire but Erin and her posse are firing on all cylinders for another ferocious season of Derry Girls. Donal O’Donoghue sets the scene
mural of the cast was unveiled on the gable end of Badger’s Bar in the city centre. It was a riot no one, not even McGee in her most optimistic moments, could have predicted, especially as her previous Channel 4 sitcom with a brogue, London Irish, which she co-wrote with her husband, Tobias Beer, failed to make any great waves.
Now Derry Girls has done exactly what Lisa McGee hoped it would, namely “to make people look at Derry and think ‘I wouldn’t mind a night out there’” and more. Within a week of its debut in January 2018, the riots-of-passage sitcom was a watercooler hit and went on to become a phenomenon, knocking all sorts of statistics out of the park such as Channel 4’s biggest comedy launch since 2004 with viewing gures of 2.5 million, the biggest ever comedy launch
Derry Girls comes from a very real place (Lisa McGee)
series on All 4 and the biggest series ever in Northern Ireland since modern records began in 2002 (as C4’s publicity has it). If comedy is tragedy plus time, this look back in a ection at her own Derry youth (“Derry Girls comes from a very real place”) was ticking all the boxes with its universal story about the perils and poignancy of growing up. “If they hated it, I could never have gone home again,” said the London-based McGee.
Aside from the sharp writing, the young, largely unknown cast were spot on, with McGee heavily involved in the casting process. She compared it to assembling the Spice Girls, getting an ensemble that worked both “as a gang and as friends.” Head girl of the Our Lady Immaculate College gang is the imperious Erin (Saoirse-Monica Jackson) and she is ably supported and very o en upstaged by her posse, among them the mischief-making Michelle (Jamie-Lee O’Donnell), other-worldly Orla (Louisa Harland), careful Clare (Nicola Coughlan) and jittery James (Dylan Llewellyn).
But there were some other inspired choices, not least a po-faced Tommy Tiernan as the much berated Free State dad, Gerry. McGee says that she wrote the character di erently once the standup comedian was on board as “Tommy can do a freak-out like few others.” e counterweight to Tiernan is Ian McElhinney as his sparring fatherin-law, Grandpa Joe, and then there is the Daddy of deadpan, Kevin McAleer as drawling Uncle Colm. All are once again to the fore as the second season opens, with a third series reportedly on the backburner.
It’s the limbo days before the IRA cease re and while politically the winds of change are blowing through the province, it is business as usual for the girls. In the opening episode, Erin and the rest of the gang are mad with excitement ahead of an outdoor pursuits weekend which aims to bring Protestant and Catholic school kids together as part of a peace initiative. But peace is the last thing on Michelle’s mind once she nds out that there will be Protestant lads on the menu. As the trailer’s tag-line teases ‘Remember when anything was possible?’ well, Derry Girls recreates those glory days, but just a whole lot funnier than they actually were.