Raucous teen sitcom that’s a triumph amid the Troubles
AThe early Nineties don’t feel so long ago. One minute, my wife and i were thinking about having children and then . . . whoosh, where did that 25 years go?
But think what simply didn’t exist back then — the internet, smartphones, reality TV, online life — a quarter of a century begins to look like aeons, and you realise 1993 belongs not just to the past, but to a different millennium.
Derry Girls (C4) captures that double perception, the simultaneous closeness and distance of the Nineties.
set in Northern ireland at the tail- end of the Troubles, this raucous sitcom follows four bright, bored, good-hearted schoolgirls as they bounce from one teenage drama to the next.
Though much was made, when the show launched two weeks ago, about its backdrop of conflict and terrorism, Derry Girls has no political point to make.
The violence is there, but as background noise: when British troops search a school bus, or an irA bomb closes the town’s main bridge, the girls’ only concern is how this affects their day.
Will erin ( saoirse- Monica Jackson) and her friends be late for maths? They hope so.
Teen sitcoms can fall into two traps. They are obnoxious and scatalogical, like The inbetweeners (which was mostly unwatchable toilet humour) — or they are smugly pleased with themselves, like Danny Baker’s memoir comedy Cradle To Grave, and Caitlin Moran’s psalm of self-praise raised By Wolves.
Derry Girls avoids both pitfalls. Writer Lisa McGee, though she’s drawing on personal experience, isn’t trying to impress us with how ‘crazy’ and ‘hilarious’ her schooldays were. she simply evokes the era and does it with characters far more than wacky situations.
There are plenty of one-liners and juvenile pranks, as well as a scathing attitude to the Catholic Church. The girls attend Our Lady immaculate College, headed by a brute of a nun whose true vocation was the New York mafia.
The latest episode centred on a statue of the Virgin Mother that appeared to be weeping: the tears turned out to be dog’s pee.
Amid the gentler family comedy, there’s a real anger against the Church — it will be interesting to see if Derry Girls maintains its light- hearted nostalgia or descends into a darker strain.
One shot at the opening of the series emphasised, quite accidentally, the distance between then and now.
singer Dolores O’riordan and her band The Cranberries scowled down from a poster on erin’s bedroom wall. O’riordan died this week, aged 46.
The musical influence on Britannia (sky Atlantic) was very different. For its theme song, this big budget, blood-thirsty tale of the roman invasion in 43AD borrowed Hurdy Gurdy Man by Donovan. A seemingly bizarre choice at first, it’s a whimsical, druggy folk song with a heavy metal chorus (pub quiz fact: half of Led Zep played on the single) that suits the show’s mood.
One minute we’re dreaming of Celtic innocence, where girls wear flowers in their hair and druids talk to stones. Then the butchery begins — tribe against tribe, roman against Briton, roman against roman.
it’s graphic stuff, even if the lens is often spinning round like a kaleidoscope to simulate madness or druidic visions.
This is sky’s headline drama for the New Year, and it’s being billed as the next Game Of Thrones.
But Britannia is more old-fashioned than that. it’s Braveheart meets Lord Of The rings.