Show + Tell with Paul Flynn
THE ’ 90s TEEN ephemera of Rae Earl’s brilliant My Mad Fat Diary was Blur, thrift-shop adidas and snakebite. The ’90s nostalgia of Lisa Mcgee’s equally fabulous Derry Girls is Gina G, Union Jack T-shirts and alcopops. The trimmings may be different, but in so many pleasing regards, the song remains exactly the same.
Erin Quinn (Saoirse Jackson: amazing) and her four supremely flaky high-school friends occupy the real-time battleground of the Irish Troubles. Because she and her magic pals are 16 years old, this is just the backcloth to their actual conflicts, like passing GCSES, dead grandmas and losing their virginities. Erin and co’s lives are measured in Red Bull, hairspray and bickering as they organise what adulthood will one day look like. If they are a rolling news item, they are blissfully, perfectly oblivious to it. The possibility of a life waiting to be lived underpins every clever note of the show.
Derry Girls is a finessed coming-of-age drama with small echoes of Father Ted, Gregory’s Girl, Mean Girls, The Inbetweeners and, in Erin’s perfectly pitched wider family set-up, a Mrs Brown’s Boys stripped of its vaudeville. It feels free-form and wild, with a proper understanding of the pent-up frustration teenagers internalise.
This week, Derry is playing host to a visiting group of schoolkids from Chernobyl. The jokes write themselves. ‘ The only thing you need to know about the situation here,’ says indomitable school principal Sister Michael, from the church lectern, ‘is that we are the good ones.’ Erin has Katya to stay – a sullen number with a touch of the taciturn emo of the sort that will eventually metamorphose into the utilitarian Russian fashion revolution of Vetements and Gosha Rubchinskiy. The culture clash is funny not just because it’s funny, but because the ’90s were the last pre-digital age, when geographical borders housed genuine identity differences.
Pitching a comedy in the middle of a situation whose repercussions can be felt both at the heart of the Brexit negotiations and with the cataclysmic influence of Arlene Foster’s DUP may just be lucky timing. In every other regard, the show’s all craft. Derry Girls has just been picked up for a second season. By season three, these girls will be rightful stars. Thursdays 10pm, Channel 4