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  • The Big Issue

    DERRY GOOD FRIENDS

    Mar 28, 2022 7 minutes
    By Adrian Lobb
    Photograph by Adam Lawrence

    What a ride it has been. More than six years have passed since we first encountered the Derry Girls. And now Erin, Orla, Clare, Michelle and James return for one final series.

    The show is a work of supreme skill. Lisa McGee has created one of the funniest programmes on television, exploring the intensity of teenage friendship while rewriting the rulebook on depictions of life during The Troubles and educating the rest of the UK about life in Northern Ireland in the 1990s. That’s some achievement.

    This is a series that stays with you. Watching troubled times through teenage eyes, reminding us that joy and innocence are nothing if not persistent. Scenes replay in the mind. Particularly the girls dancing to Madonna in the school talent show at the end of series one, while, at home, their families watch coverage of a devastating bomb attack in horror. Two parallel existences in one place at one time, as Dreams by The Cranberries fades in.

    The final series is set in the months before the Good Friday Agreement. These are monumental times. The Derry Girls are getting their GCSE results. And there has been a change

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