Lisa McGee: ‘Derry Girls took on such a life of its own. It’s a wee bit everyone’s now’

Lisa McGee, who just won an Emmy award for Derry Girls, wanted to be a writer for as long as she can remember. “I was always writing stories. I was always trying to make my classmates laugh. It was one of the few things I was good at. I knew that my story would probably be read out… And even then I was using dirty tricks like using my real classmates’ names in my stories, because I knew I’d probably get a better laugh.”

She was using showbiz tricks even then. “Totally. Thinking of the audience and how to win them over.”

When did she realise being a writer was a job that she could aspire to? “I remember watching Murder She Wrote at around eight and that was my first connection, ‘Oh, this woman makes those books’.” She laughs. “This sounds really stupid but I thought ‘That’s a job!’ Then I wanted to be her. That was the first thing I wanted to be: Jessica Fletcher.”

Her family and friends were, she says, very supportive of her writerly ambitions. “You hear other [writers] from working class backgrounds saying, ‘Oh my God, everyone was so shocked!’ But it genuinely wasn’t like that. In Derry it was very much… ‘Go for it – but you also have to make money.’ It was always very encouraging, but not in an unrealistic way.” She laughs. “There would have been no floating me financially while I found my voice or anything.”

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She worries, however, about the way UK television is dominated by more privileged writers. “I have a bias that goes the other way. If someone is from a working class background and they’re in this industry, I think they’re probably better, because it’s tough. The work is going to be richer for including more voices. But I think it’s getting really bad again.”

She thinks part of that acceptance of her aspirations was an Irish thing. “If you’re Irish, you’re always surrounded by these great Irish writers,” she says. “Seamus Heaney and Brian Friel, they were from up the road. So it wasn’t like this was out of my reach completely.”

[ Lisa McGee: ‘If I was a different writer, Derry Girls could be quite a bleak show’ ]

Did she have lofty ideas, like Erin in Derry Girls? Did she think perhaps she could be a Brian Friel? “I still have lofty ideas about being Brian Friel,” she says. “I definitely had those ideas, and tried to do more serious stuff or shocking stuff when I was younger. It always just became funny… Even with the period dramas I wrote on [BBC1′s The White Queen and Channel 4′s Indian Summers] I was often given the stupider episodes… I think I’m very privileged to be a comic writer now.”

McGee has had a pretty impressive career even before Derry Girls. After studying drama in Queen’s, she went on to write for the National Theatre in London and soon she was writing RTÉ’s kitchen drama Raw. “The first series of it I love, because it was loose and wild and it was on RTÉ2, and it was a younger show. They moved to RTÉ1 and it became more of a Sunday night show and a wee bit cleaner – so I didn’t like it as much.”

She also wrote for Toby Whitehouse’s Being Human on BBC3, an equal parts funny and dark show about a flatsharing vampire, werewolf and ghost. “I’d never in a million years thought I’d have written on a vampire/werewolf thing, but it’s a funny show so I loved it. It was so original and so well done. It never jarred. In one episode there’d be a mass murder on a train, and earlier they’re arguing over whose turn it was to make the tea.”

Her ideal stories, she says, are ones in which a group of friends is having funny adventures (she mentions Scooby Doo, The Goonies, Seinfeld and Friends), and she always wanted to do it in her own accent. “I fell in love with writing because I love writing dialogue and I love the patterns in the way we speak... the particularness of that. My friends really make me laugh and Irish humour makes me laugh… I can write funny, but I’m not the one making jokes in the pub. I have funny friends and I’m good at listening.”

I’m just in awe of my parents really. My God, these people were incredible to have made our lives ordinary while all this sh*t was going on. I wasn’t grateful enough...

The first Derry-accented project she made was London Irish, a comedy about young ne’er-do-wells living in London. It lasted just one season before cancellation. “It was heartbreaking,” she says. “It felt like unfinished business for years. You just thought, ‘God, couldn’t we do one more series…' It’s all the same people as on Derry Girls, the same people behind the scenes, so we all thankfully got to finish a show together, but we were gutted.” Of course, if London Irish had continued, a lot of things would be different. “I was asked on a panel the other day if London Irish had gone to four series would Derry Girls have happened – and probably not.”

How does she typically react to setbacks? “I’m really good at picking myself up,” she says. “I think it’s one of the bonuses of not coming from privilege. I’ve always had to earn money. I can’t not write... That’s just the way I’ve come up in the industry. With London Irish, there was no choice. I just had to get on another show. So I went on to Indian Summers after that... But that’s a good thing too. If I have advice for people in TV coming up, it’s: have a couple of things going, a couple of ideas you love and are passionate about. Don’t just have one, because it will break your heart.”

After London Irish was cancelled, her next personally helmed project was even more rooted in Northern Ireland – Derry Girls. “It doesn’t make any sense, I know. But there’s a big bit of luck involved in everything. London Irish got my foot in the door with the comedy team there… So they made us a solid script commission [for Derry Girls], and at the time of writing that script I think they needed female stuff and ‘regional’ stuff… It was a good script, there at the right time... And that’s kind of terrifying in a way, because there are lots of factors involved that you’ve got no control over.”

[ ‘Derry Girls’ creator Lisa McGee honoured at television industry event in London ]

She suspects part of Derry Girls’ success is that people really wanted to see a goofy gang of girls. Teenagers in most teen shows have a different energy, she says. “They’re all sexy. That’s what winds me up. Sexy teenage girls I can’t be dealing with. I’m just allergic to that. [The girls in Derry Girls] are just eejits the way boys are. I think that was a thing – seeing girls being represented honestly.”

There were other factors in the success which she thinks were just a matter of luck, like the fact enough time had passed for people to be receptive to a Troubles-set comedy. Was it difficult balancing the ridiculousness of the girls’ adventures with the seriousness of the setting? “Obviously, there’s stuff to do with the Troubles we could never go into in Derry Girls, it would just change the whole fabric of the show,” she says. “Some of it’s just too horrific. So you chose what parts of the story you can tell truthfully and always through these kids’ eyes. That gave me my way in to do it – what I was allowed to see on the news and what I was hearing.”

It was personally cathartic, she says. “I feel so lucky. You know the way people say, ‘I wish I could go back.’ Well, I got to go back. The set was completely recreated [to be] like my living room. The school, that was my school… It felt like I got to walk through the past and relive it a wee bit. I’ll never have an experience like it again.”

She had done a lot of rethinking by then. “I’m just in awe of my parents really,” she says. “My God, these people were incredible to have made our lives ordinary while all this sh*t was going on. I wasn’t grateful enough... It was only much, much later, when I was having my own children, that I thought about my own childhood and how scared my parents must have been a lot of the time. Back then I would have just been very huffy about the fact I wasn’t allowed go out… or do certain things.”

The show quickly became a cultural touchstone. A blackboard in the background in season two outlining the differences between Protestants and Catholics became an internet meme. When the art department showed it to her she thought, “That’s brilliant, but we’re not really going to be focused on that blackboard. But sure people were freeze-framing it, and thank Christ our art department was so good because every single inch of that blackboard was covered.”

Derry Girls made very few concessions to viewers who didn’t know Derry slang. Was she conscious of that? “There are some Derryisms I wouldn’t have used because they’re too insane.”

Straight drama always felt more fake to me because nobody cracked a joke ever... I get frustrated with critics because I think comedy is reviewed so harshly compared to drama

Like what? “There’s ‘lurred’ [she spells it out] which means ‘really happy’… People think it might come from ‘Lourdes’, that you’ve seen a miracle and that’s why you’re happy.” That term, she says, would have been too difficult for the casual viewer. “It pulls focus from the story. You’re losing three jokes because the audience has their ears in the wrong place. But ‘wain’ [child/kid] – everyone can grasp that quickly and not lose the sentence.”

Did she expect it to do so well internationally? “When we started making it, it was just Channel 4, and if we had known [Netflix would take it] we might have made some decisions that might have made it better or worse,” she says. “It’s such a weird show. To have anyone other than people in Ireland or the UK watching it, why they even turn it on, is beyond me.”

[ Derry Girls’ Lisa McGee named among most powerful people in British TV ]

She suspects that with good comedies the viewer doesn’t need to understand everything. “My favourite joke in Friends, and I laughed very hard at the time, was when Joey said something stupid and Chandler said: ‘You have to stop the Q-Tip when there’s resistance.’ I didn’t know what that means but the way he delivered it [told] me that it’s really funny. There was no internet, really, so I couldn’t look it up. So for ages I was laughing happily at something I didn’t understand because Matthew Perry was really funny. And now I know what it means and it is very funny.”

She sweats over her jokes, rewriting lines again and again. “For me, it’s 99 per cent rhythm… If the rhythm is not bang on, [the joke] doesn’t work... It’s really mathematical. I’ll just go ahead and take one word out and I put one word in. It’s just such a precise thing.”

She doesn’t enjoy things that have no humour in them. “People are funny and awkward in real life,” she says. “Straight drama always felt more fake to me because nobody cracked a joke ever... I get frustrated with critics because I think comedy is reviewed so harshly compared to drama. When there’s something about a comedy that’s not quite for them, people feel so offended.”

But hasn’t comedy become more expansive and experimental in recent years? “I think so... It doesn’t even need to have laughs in it. The Bear is considered a comedy, isn’t it? It’s not funny, but it’s brilliant, and I get what they mean by it being a comedy. There’s something in the tone of it… I wonder though. I’m watching Frasier again, the first Frasier. I really miss those studio sitcoms.”

Would she like to make an old-fashioned, studio audience sitcom? “I’d love to do that. I just don’t know if anyone would watch it the way they used to. They’re the absolute toughest thing to write… I’m in awe at the jokes [on Frasier].”

I think [Derry Girls] took on such a life of its own, particularly in Derry. It feels like it’s a wee bit everyone’s now

I tell her that after a recent bereavement, the wake episode of Derry Girls brought much needed joy to my family. People often tell her they watch Derry Girls when they’re sad. “I’m learning what a gift it is to be in this industry, to be allowed to make people laugh for a living. I would have taken that very lightly in the past. I take comedy really seriously now.”

She lives in Belfast these days, having moved there with her family recently after years in London. She’s married to the English actor and writer Tobias Beer, with whom she made the Channel 5 show The Deceived, and they have two children aged seven and four. “I delivered the pilot for Derry Girls on my due date with my older boy. Then they green lit it when he was about two months old. So my oldest boy, all of his life has been Derry Girls. He’s so sick of it.”

[ Derry Girls’ Lisa McGee: ‘A lot of stuff about Northern Ireland is very male’ ]

Have they seen it? “They’ve seen the trailer. I don’t think they think much of it. They’ve never laughed. They say they’re going to write their own show. Which they probably will. Their only idea is that it’s about boys... I keep saying, ‘You’re going to need more than that.’”

When I call McGee, she’s just coming out of a meeting with the script editor of her upcoming Channel 4 comedy thriller series, How to get to Heaven from Belfast. Is it important for her to write more Irish-set stories? “The Irish thing is just a way for me to keep the bar high for myself because I don’t want to disappoint people... You know the way Irish people really get grumpy if [an Irish thing] is sh*t?” She laughs. “It’s a wee bit of pressure.”

What does it feel like to win an Emmy? “It’s surreal... It’s amazing and I’m very proud of it, and it has afforded me these amazing opportunities – but I think [Derry Girls] took on such a life of its own, particularly in Derry. It feels like it’s a wee bit everyone’s now.”

Being referenced on the Simpsons and having comedy giants in America admiring your writing must be bizarre. “That’s nuts. But everyone who’s doing [this] is just trying to do it better. People who are really successful that I’ve met or had conversations with, the thing they all have in common is they’re trying to get a new trick out of you. They all want to know how you do it… Writers always want to know a secret that makes it easier.”

Is there a secret that makes it easier? “I was going to ask you.”

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