Derry Girls

“Oh, you should watch Derry Girls,” everyone said, “It’s so funny.”  Well, I did.  And it is.  My fame as a TV blogger has been spreading far and wide, resulting in an inundation of recommendations for things I should watch and write about.  A lot of the time I nod and smile, wondering if people realise these posts are more about me than any of the programmes in question, but the input is mostly welcome.  Like any normal person, I don’t always know which boxsets won’t let me down.  Peer-to-peer word of mouth comes in very handy.  I had totally missed the first series of Derry Girls when it premiered back in early 2018, and I still hadn’t sorted myself out in time for the second in March 2019.  If I’m honest, I don’t like watching things on Channel 4 that much.  It’s because I’m exposed to trails for their other shows and want to watch almost everything else, and we can all see that I already spend far too much time with telly.

Nevertheless, the first series is on Netflix, while I was able to catch up on the second with Channel 4 On Demand.  I don’t know if it’s called All4 anymore, or if it went back to 4oD, or maybe it’s Catchy Uppy or something (and I should know really, given my job), but I do know they don’t frequency cap their ads on there.  I’ve seen the same McDonald’s spots upwards of ten times, yet I’m still unswerving from my lifelong vow never to consume food from that hellhole.  Their agency has literally wasted them around 5p on me.  The good news is, after all the award wins, Derry Girls will be back for a third series.  Let’s unpick what has made it so successful.

Silly Accents

For those that don’t know, Derry is in Northern Ireland, so most of the dialogue is in the famous local accent and dialect where “how now brown cow?” becomes “hurr nurr brurn curr?” though I was disappointed that my favourite ever Northern Irish word didn’t make an appearance: a friend from the same town grew up thinking that passing wind was called doing a roodie doodie (say it out loud in your best Northern Irish accent) until he, as an adult, realised it was actually just his family that did that.  Either way, I commented in my post on Nighty Night how the right accent can make everything seem funny.  Add a good old “so it is” on the end of each sentence and this Celtic turn compounds the effect even further.

Nostalgia

We’re not just in Derry, we’re in Derry in the 1990s.  Mobile phones weren’t yet a thing, PJ & Duncan hadn’t become Ant and Dec and double denim was still on its first time around.  Derry Girls plants you unmistakably in the decade, not just through the hair and fashion and (lack of) tech, but through a soundtrack that surprises and delights the viewer at every turn.  That’s if you’re old enough to remember.  If you’re not, then get out.  But who would have thought that Gina G’s Ooh Aah… Just A Little Bit would still sound like such a banger?  I’m sitting here with a Spotify playlist lifted directly from the show, wondering how on earth I bring about some sort of personal Ace of Base reunion tour.

The Hilarity of Sectarian Violence

The Troubles, at least to a Surrey schoolboy, always seemed a bit far off and endless – the kind of thing you tune out as it’s a bit overexposed: a bit like climate change, Brexit or Boris Johnson.  While teenage life is full of frustrations (see the post on The Inbetweeners), I can’t imagine the further paralysing effect of growing up in the midst of a conflict that claimed over 3,000 lives.  Our Derry Girls are of the Catholic persuasion (allowing easier pickings for jokes about priests, nuns and the Pope) but any real antipathy towards protestants is reserved for their parents and grandparents.  A protestant boy is as good a ride as any, at least according to Michelle.  If you’re not familiar with the Troubles, though, you can look forward to the whole thing being reignited for an unnecessary sequel, courtesy of our good pal Brexit.

Outstanding Characters

You’ll come to love the Derry Girls (and boy) but it’s Michelle that has all the best lines: “You can’t ring Childline every time your mother threatens to kill you.”  Her scrunchy perm and hoop earrings are mere accessories to her pursuit of the best craic no matter the consequences.  Cousin Orla, meanwhile, clinches it for the best individual accent, aided by the strangeness of her every utterance.  Our lead, Erin Quinn, has amazing timing, but her mouth never stops moving, while Clare spends most of each episode shrieking.  It’s actually the supporting cast I enjoy the most.  School swot, Jenny Joyce, is an instant favourite, with her delicious unstoppable smugness at every turn wonderfully foiled by Sister Michael’s utter disgust at her sycophancy.  Jenny’s assembly harmonies show a voice as weak as her two shoes are goodie.

But Erin and Orla’s family deliver the most laughs.  We’ve all been cornered by an Uncle Colm – a relation whose unending stories guarantee instant boredom.  We all know someone as self-centred as Aunt Sarah – the kind of person who wears white to a wedding.  And we all love a matriarch as domineering as Mary.  Erin’s mum truly is a domestic force to be reckoned with, often ending up an unwilling accomplice in the girls’ ill-advised misdemeanours.  She captures some major universal mum-isms that can be recognised among the Irish, the British and the world over.  She gets the names of new things wrong, mistakenly thinking that Take That are called This And That.  And she has strong sentiments about laundry, flying off the handle when someone suggests doing just a half load of washing because doing “A half load goes against everything I stand for.”  My own mother once matched this when I asked her innocently why she preferred Sainsbury’s over Tesco, to which she responded instantly, “I just hate everything Tesco stand for as a company.”  Fairly neutral then.

So, well done to Lisa McGee, the show’s writer and creator.  She’s added something to the national canon that’s so nuanced and local that I’m thrilled at the thought of other English-speaking countries struggling to work out what on earth is going in each episode.  Maybe someone’s told them they should watch Derry Girls because it’s so funny.  But they can’t.  It’s ours.

Years And Years

Sometimes watching TV can be torture.  Granted, it often comes with the accompanying sentiment that you could be doing something better with your time: connecting with family members, perhaps, or making a difference in your community by volunteering to help those in need.  Once you’ve quashed those feelings by persuading yourself that you’ve worked hard enough all week and you’re perfectly entitled to exist inertly on the sofa while images are beamed into your head for the purpose of entertainment though, it’s the content on that hypnotising and paralysing screen that can cause untold pain.  Whether it’s the bodies on Love Island that you will never have, or the bright young things who are already better than you on University Challenge, the sought-after escapism can sometimes give way to unavoidable introspection, leading to an analysis of your reality that makes you feel worse than you did when you popped the telly on.  Enter, then, Years And Years.

An evening peak drama of course has the artistic license to fabricate a world where things happen that are more interesting than daily life.  Downton Abbey mixed ye olde moral compass with the foibles of servant management.  Line Of Duty poses the question: what if all those coppers are bent?  Either way, they offer distance from our humdrum existences, making the characters’ often terrible experience seem exciting and diverting.  Conversely, Years And Years can only fill its audience with dread.  Its narrative device?  It’s set a little bit in the future.  Not quite the virtual reality-dominated future of Black Mirror where attaching little metallic discs to your temple is all you need to enter wholly into an alternative reality.  No, we’re talking a few months’ away.  Things that might happen next year, and the year after, and then, as a result, a few years after that as well.

Why would this be so terrifying?  Two things: not actually knowing what will happen and fearing that the worst-case scenario will win out over the best.  And it’s so near that it’s not a single future that’s been imagined and will affect subsequent generations.  It’s what we ourselves might have to go through as our lives progress.  2019 headlines veer from climate crisis to Brexit farce via alt-right resurgence, neoliberal inequality and the rejection of truth in favour of malleable feeling.  Our future is not looking bright, it’s looking orange (if there’s more Trump and that).  Weathering this onslaught of one thing after the other, our everyman Lyons family boldly goes where a pessimistic media has long predicted we will all end up.

But the Lyons aren’t like most families.  This is because they talk on the phone in group chats all the time.  My own family mostly communicates by a Whatsapp group I set up a few years back.  In it, my sister and parents coordinate my niece’s schedule of educational and extra-curricular activities, my niece herself hijacks the group to use all the emojis at once or to leave voicenotes of her wailing comically, and my mum plumbs new depths of autocorrect mayhem that I am now expert at deciphering.  Conversely, the Lyons, who are split into the five constituent units of four adult siblings and their grandmother, chat through their latest news, pass comment on the world around them and pursue passive-aggressive banter.  In the first example of future technological advancement, they do all this through the voice-activated Signor service, a kind of Alexa-type gadget that actually seems to serve a purpose.

Now, if you thought I was going to make a comment on the family’s diversity, you can get off now.  The Lyons’ ticking of every box in this area might be a socially conscious casting director’s wet dream, but each Lyon is so much more than an exercise in representation, even though their very visibility on screen is significant to communities that don’t always see themselves reflected in their own entertainment.  If, along the way, even some viewers move beyond seeing people as categories and instead view them as individuals, then it can’t hurt for Years And Years to avail itself of the full spectrum of human potential.  So, who are these Lyons onto whom the near future is projected?

Our grand-matriarch comes in the form of Anne Reid (a favourite from dinnerladies), providing a lens on the encroaching of the future into family life that has both the confusion and the liberal attitude of old age.  Rory Kinnear is Stephen Lyons, the settled wealthier son, husband and dad of two, contrasting with his sister, Edith, who has been off around the world on moral missions (played by Jessica Hynes, whose amazing performance as Cheryl in The Royle Family I am currently reliving to great joy).  Feisty younger sister Rosie, meanwhile, succumbs to a more reflexive response to the events that engulf the family, while Danny Lyons, played by Russell Tovey (who should be in more, if not all, things) has a more idealistic approach to the ensuing calamity.

And calamity is what does ensue.  Each episode is interspersed with a number of montages that take us through the course of time, showcasing the family birthdays that mark each passing year as we journey into 2020 and the decade beyond.  Sound-tracked by a choir singing, this change of pace propels us into disaster each time – so much so, in fact, that you begin to dread its every appearance.  I now have a phobia of choirs singing, as they herald bad things.  Inhumane legislation creeps in, international tensions escalate, environments are plundered and, throughout, the British media and public make multiple catastrophic decisions.  Punctuating each of these current affairs round-ups is Emma Thompson (as if the cast weren’t already strong enough), having the time of her life as Vivienne Rook, some sort of Lady Farage (yet, here’s a lie) whose emergent and morally ambiguous political party gradually grows from a fringe movement to a mainstream force for wrong (ring any bells?).

Not only is there the human drama of the Lyons, then, with arguments, infidelity and deep-rooted resentment, but this is compounded by the consequences of the future’s news.  And the nature of compounding, is that it happens over and over (like in The Mandibles by Lionel Shriver).  Each montage screws them more than the one before, and in every area of their lives: employment, freedom, healthcare, housing, human rights etc.  Very occasionally, the relation of this back to the storyline is a touch wedged: some clunking lines swing in overhead to set out the wider political context.  Parts of the technological advancement also tip things unnecessarily from thought-provoking drama to science fiction fantasy, but there’s no reason a TV show can’t be both.  Whatever this is, it’s wildly entertaining, if you can stand the torture.  We’re not yet through all six episodes, but you always know something bad is going to happen, just like with the future in real life.  I’m pinned into my sofa at each viewing on BBC iPlayer and almost crumble under the tension of every time-accelerating montage – here we go again… to oblivion.  It really is potluck who will make it through each episode.  Just like it’s potluck who’ll make it through our real future.