A view from the Bog Side
In which we wonder if Derry Girls has lost its mojo
OK, call me a party-pooper, label me a humbug and batter me with a sock lled with manure (metaphorically, I hope), but may I just say that maybe, just maybe, Derry Girls is not quite what it was? Of course, I can say that because I have the conch and I’m going to say whatever comes into my head. Like right now I’m going to shout RUMPELSTILTSKIN, bark father ted and hiss in a sneaky sibiliant tone, ‘Jump the shark’.
A couple of weeks ago, with the advance praise still ringing in my ears (literally as I was playing it on my iPad) I watched the opening episode of season two of Derry Girls. I was ready for it, loins fully girded and upper lip stiffened. And yet my sides didn’t split, no aisle was rolled in and the dish didn’t in fact run away with the spoon.
Instead we had Sister Michael doing her Sister Michael thing (lots of sighing and looks heavenward and one good line that was carried over from season one), Father Peter smoothing his shiny hair and the girls knocking out punchlines set up by the Four Marys.
Sure there was the blackboard with its hieroglyphics of the di erences and similarities between Protestants v Catholics, as well as an abseil fraught with comic terror and a brief feinting between Gerry (Tommy Tiernan as deadpan as a attened wok) and the father-in-law (Ian McElhinney much funnier than his Game of rones schtick).
Perhaps it’s just that we have been spoilt for choice or sunk by anticipation.
Already this year there have been (at least) two brilliant half hours of comedy: the masterly ambiguous nale of Catastrophe and the coruscating opening episode of season two of Fleabag, both wielding writing so sharp it could skewer a critic. So maybe I did make the mistake of watching Fleabag immediately a er Derry Girls. “But they are two completely di erent types of comedy,” said my wife, not unreasonably, as I used a slide rule and pause button to measure visual jokes, register punchlines and clock the speed of running gags.
Great expectations are dangerous things, hard to live up to unless you’re a novel written by Charles Dickens. So it goes with the second season of Derry Girls as it might with the nal showdown of Game of rones or the news that Mrs Brown’s Boys has breathed its last (that one’s made up). So here’s to Derry Girls rediscovering its mojo or just giving us more of Gerry v the father-in-law!
Donal O’Donoghue