Life

TV review: Derry Girls was giggle rather than laugh out loud

Billy Foley

Billy Foley

Billy has almost 30 years’ experience in journalism after leaving DCU with a BAJ. He has worked at the Irish Independent, Evening Herald and Sunday Independent in Dublin, the Cork-based Evening Echo and the New Zealand Herald. He joined the Irish News in 2000, working as a reporter and then Deputy News Editor. He has been News Editor since 2007

The Derry Girls went on a cross community outing
The Derry Girls went on a cross community outing The Derry Girls went on a cross community outing

Derry Girls, Channel 4, Tuesday at 9.15pm

Comedy is generally fairly easy to review - did I laugh? How much did I laugh?

That approach, however, seems a bit simplistic for Derry Girls which has taken on enormous cultural significance since the first series ended.

They’ve put up a giant mural of the show’s characters in their home city for God’s sake.

For all its success and brilliance, I don’t think there’s a mural to Del Boy and Rodney in Peckham.

The show’s creator, Lisa McGee, has become a national treasure and the show’s actors are household names.

Channel 4 has also given it its full backing. There was a wrap on the London Metro newspaper advertising the show this week, along with interviews on The One Show, BBC 5 Live and others.

Derry Girls has succeeded in television’s toughest genre. Sitcoms have a lower success rate that DUP/Sinn Féin talks which is apt given that Irish sitcoms seem to only work when they are made by British television stations.

And so we entered back into the world of Derry Girls on Tuesday night wondering if the second series would keep us laughing.

The girls, and the ‘wee English fella’, went off on a reconciliation weekend to meet Protestants and build bridges, an activity seemingly required of all teenagers in Northern Ireland in the 1990s.

It opened up classic sitcom territory, with a Northern Ireland twist, of double-entendre, misunderstanding and teenage embarrassment.

There were some good lines about Gerry Adams having to be dubbed on the TV because his voice was “too sexy,” the convent girls desperate to meet boys, Protestant or not, and Catholics “buzzing off statues.”

Clare was determined to meet a “fully blown” Protestant after the despised Jenny declared that she was already friendly with a “half-Protestant.”

There was initially panic when Orla couldn’t find someone to pair with. She calls to Sister Michael: “I don’t have a Protestant!” “You’ll just have to share with James,” she is told. “There aren’t enough Protestants to go round.”

Clare bored the pants off the lad she was paired with from Londonderry Boys Academy but didn’t realise he was deaf in one ear.

This was the worst gag of the episode and was meant to be the centrepiece of the scene as the hands across the divide group went abseiling to demonstrate their trust in each other.

Clare is left dangling down a cliff face convinced the boy is going to let her drop because he is a “fenian hating madman.” In fact he misheard her and said he didn’t like ‘athletes’ not Catholics.

It’s still too early to say if Derry Girls will enter the television gold category. I remember thinking early episodes of Father Ted were a bit naff, but then the characters grow on you and the catchphrases enter everyday conversation.

So did I laugh at episode one? A couple of times.

***

Home, Channel 4, Tuesday at 9.45pm

Channel 4 went for a double comedy launch on Tuesday, with Home following Derry Girls.

Home is about a family who find a Syrian refugee in their car boot after stopping in a Calais petrol station on their way home from France.

Sami removed some of their luggage to fit in and ended up being taken in by the family and allowed to stay at their Woking home.

It was so desperate to show that the refugee, an English teacher from Damascus, was a honest and decent human being who was worried about his wife and children trying to make their way across Europe, that it forgot about the jokes.

Did I laugh? Not once.