Lisa McGee

The Irish women making TV's best comedies

From Channel 4's Derry Girls to RTE's Nowhere Fast, female-led Irish comedies are coming thick and fast. We talk to the people behind them, and ask if they can help drive societal change.

In order "to give their wee lungs a bit of a clear out", a group of teenagers from Chernobyl visit Derry. Naturally, forthright Erin, a naif who imagines herself worldly, expects her house guest to be appropriately grateful, only to find sophisticated Katya (Diona Doherty) treats her with disdain. Elsewhere, Granda Joe makes a new friend, a development that goes down badly with his daughters. Lisa McGee's Troubles-set comedy continues to be a rare combination of poignant and laugh-out-loud funny.

Derry Girls - reviewed by a real Derry Girl

Claire Allan grew up in Derry in the '90s - and attended the same high school depicted in Channel 4 comedy Derry Girls. She looks at how the hit show captures that time and place.

Thank you, Derry Girls, for telling the truth

There have been times, I must admit, when I have quietly put off watching plays and television series set in Troubles-era Northern Ireland. It's not that I don't think they will be good. It's just that, having grown up there in the 1970s and 1980s, with stories of grim tit-for-tat murders regularly on the nightly news, I sometimes have to brace myself imaginatively to re-enter the bullets and barbed-wire side of our history: it might be painful if a dramatist conveys the events and atmosphere accurately, and painful in another way if they don't.This caveat does not apply to Derry Girls, the new Channel 4 series by Lisa McGee, which follows a bunch of 16-year-old Catholic schoolgirls in the early Nineties.

Derry Girls is the funniest thing on TV

Lisa McGee's sitcom has already been renewed for another series by Channel 4, and deserves it for its wicked sense of humour and pitch-perfect 90s nostalgia.

Derry Girls, episode three review

Derry Girls (Channel 4) feels like an indie antidote to the full-on populism of Mrs Brown's Boys.

Apart from a slightly improbable precocity about the performances of the schoolgirls of its title, Lisa McGee's sitcom, set in Ireland in the mid-90s at the tail end of the Troubles, is highly engaging, bristlingly funny stuff. This week, they are particularly on edge having been up all night studying for an exam. However, a dubious case of an "apparition" affords them the chance to get out of the exam and spend quality theological time with the dishy Father Peter.

Derry Girls: comedy you need to beat the January blues

Lisa McGee's coming of age tale is causing a stir online - here's why.

"My name is Erin Quinn. I'm 16 years old and I come from a place called Derry." This narrated introduction to Derry Girls (C4) is not all it seems: Erin's weird cousin Orla was reading aloud from Erin's purloined diary, much to Erin's consternation.

Set in 1990s Northern Ireland and loosely based on the teen years of writer Lisa McGee (Being Human), Derry Girls is such a fresh look at growing up with the Troubles as a constant backdrop that it sometimes unsettles, although it mostly stays on the charming side of wicked. Erin (Saoirse Monica Jackson) and her friends long to break free from the conformity of their convent school, but lack the resolve for even minor defiance. "I'm not being individual on me own," says Clare.

Rounding out the group is loudmouth loose cannon Michele, who turns up to the first day of school with her English cousin James, the son of her aunt Cathy. "She went to England to get an abortion and never came back," said Michele. "Never had the abortion either."

Such difficulties as the girls face spring as much from their desire to fit in as from their attempts at rebellion, and the Troubles are presented, so far, as an inconvenience - soldiers boarding school buses, bombed bridges ruining plans - far less frightening than stone-faced headmistress Sister Michael.

You couldn't call Derry Girls nostalgic, exactly; it doesn't make me long to be the only English boy in a 90s Irish girls' school without any men's loos. But the period is recreated with care, and the script is affectionate, foul-mouthed and funny. I'm looking forward to next week.