It has been a long time since I’ve written a blog. It’s not that it’s been a deliberate neglection, but rather it has just fallen so far down the priority list this last year, it’s practically been buried into the ground. If you read my little mission statement that I outlined in my very first blog (not that I’m suggesting you do) you’ll see that I wanted to use this page as an outlet for my passions; essentially anything that I care about enough that I feel the need to put my feelings towards it on paper, or yknow WordPress. This has previously included why Chelsea shouldn’t sack Frank Lampard (that one was proven almost immediately idiotic), the f***ing European Super League (still fuming about that) and then any books or films that I fell in love with. And it is the latter that is the reason for me ending my self-imposed blog hiatus now.
I have just watched the final ever episode of Derry Girls. And though I am prone to over-exaggeration and have a tendency to declare the last good thing I’ve seen as “the greatest ever”, I am actually pretty confident in this latest shotgun reaction: Derry Girls is the past decade’s best, and defining, television comedy.
I actually first discovered the show around three years ago, in a pre-Covid world, when I was living abroad in Germany. I think I was randomly suggested some small clip compilations on YouTube and when caught in one of those mindless YouTube cycles where all your body is capable of is clicking the next video, I found Derry Girls for the first time. Perhaps on some level, I was crying out for the comfort of traditional British humour in my unfamiliar surroundings and that’s why it connected with me. Or it could be that the show is just really, really bloody funny.
It is perfectly suited to my sense of humour. Not necessarily jokes every minute and not anything dramatically cruel or shocking. Not quite a PG kind of comedy, but certainly 12A. It’s gentle humour, not clever or experimental, just real people making fun of each other like real people do. It’s something I mentioned in my love letter to Gavin and Stacey (https://georgefbrown.wordpress.com/2021/01/16/a-love-letter-to-gavin-and-stacey/) and it’s not as easy or as unremarkable as it sounds. It’s incredibly hard to write, and then to recreate on screen.
This is linked to the fact that the show is so intrinsically tied to its setting; you can’t ignore the Derry in Derry Girls basically. It is a snapshot of one specific place in one very specific era, with an incredibly important historical context. And it’s based on the creator’s (Lisa McGee) own childhood experiences in that place. So, it’s not really a surprise that it all feels real. To some extent, it probably is. However, the next reason I think the show deserves so much credit is that it would be easy, within the cosy little world it creates, to get comfortable and unambitious with its content. Instead, McGee takes risks with her themes and plotlines and they all pay off.
Even though great efforts are made to make it seem like the 1990’s, we still have clever little hints to the issues of today. One of the girls, Claire, is revealed to be a lesbian in Series One, and that is quickly and happily accepted by her friends and family. Without stereotyping, I think it’s a fair statement that your average Catholic family in 1990’s Northern Ireland might not have been quite so understanding, so it’s certainly a deliberate move on the part of the writer to normalise this. And, as with everything in Derry Girls, it allows for some fantastic and unproblematic comedy. One of my favourite scenes in the last series is Claire’s parents talking to an openly gay friend about their daughter, I can’t quote it directly but it’s something like: “Our daughter’s one too, though she’s still young, so she’s not fully qualified yet.”
And this risk-taking continues with the show’s outright refusal to ignore the darker side of the time period. It weaves the everyday, nonsensical issues of teenage life in with the major events of The Troubles seamlessly: Season One concludes with the girls joining Orla in a joyful step-aerobics session on stage whilst her family watches the news coverage of a nearby bombing on television, the girls celebrate James’s decision to stay in Derry whilst waiting for President Clinton to make a speech and in the finale, Erin and Orla’s eighteenth birthday party is somewhat overshadowed by the referendum on the Good Friday Agreement. Which leads me to my final point:
I recently listened to the podcast, Brydon &, where he was joined by his Would I Lie To You co-star, and one of my favourite TV personalities, David Mitchell. During their chat, Mitchell outlined that he thinks very strongly that comedy is the hardest thing to do and, most strikingly, the very highest form of art. I agree with him. It’s one thing to create tension and drama using real-life events, its another to subtly comment on them whilst managing to make someone laugh at the same time. And that’s what Derry Girls does. In the final episode, the two opposing sides of the referendum are embodied in a childish falling out between Erin and Michelle whilst the entire Troubles conflict is represented through a hilariously terrible school play (taking me back to the shameless, cringeworthy cliches of GCSE drama performances).
Just when Derry Girls has you laughing your head off, that’s when it makes you cry. And it’s all so deliberate and expertly crafted. It’s precisely because we are so familiar and comfortable with these characters that it affects us so much when things go wrong for them. Obviously, there was the genuine gut-wrencher of the death of Claire’s dad in episode five (spoilers, sorry), but there are subtler touches like Michelle actually looking affected by the horrendously amateur Troubles sketch as it caused her to think of her ostracised and imprisoned IRA fighter brother or my personal favourite moment of the whole show: Joe putting his hand on son-in-law Gerry’s shoulder when they watch the bomb report, having spent practically every other second of the series chastising him with increasingly inventive insults.
I honestly can’t speak highly enough of the show and I could keep writing for a lot longer about its considerable merits, but I’ll end with this: In a world of endless sequels and various “universes”, there is a real lack of anything new or original. And then Derry Girls stepped forwards. And somehow a comedy set in 90’s Northern Ireland has become the defining show for our new, modern era.
George F Brown 