Derry Girls: Filming finally begins on third series, Lisa McGee confirms

The third and final season of the hit TV series Derry Girls is starting filming in Northern Ireland, according to the comedy's creator, Lisa McGee.

McGee said on Twitter today that the series is set as “the place they call home starts to change and Northern Ireland enters a new more hopeful phase – which was a small magical window of time”.

She added: “Derry Girls is a love letter to the place I come from and the people who shaped me. It has been an honour to write it and I will be forever proud of everything it’s achieved... We’re excited to start filming this series with our incredible cast and crew to hopefully take our loyal fans on one last adventure.”

The cast of Nicola Coughlan, Saoirse-Monica Jackson, Louisa Harland, Jamie-Lee O'Donnell and Dylan Llewellyn are all due to return, alongside Siobhán McSweeney, who plays Sr Michael, the group's school principal.

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According to Ian McElhinney, who plays Granda Joe in the Channel 4 comedy, filming should wrap up before Christmas, with an expected transmission date of spring 2022.

The third season was confirmed in April 2019, but filming was repeatedly delayed by the coronavirus pandemic.

McGee said in 2019 that the new episodes would be set in a more hopeful period for the group of friends, as their hometown marched towards peace and the Belfast Agreement of 1998.

“I have a political back story I want to do,” she told Radio Times. “It’s a bit scary but I’ll have to start writing things down soon. We’ll continue from ’95, so obviously it was very different for us then – for one thing all these splinter organisations came out of nowhere, which was quite strange, and then people were just getting used to peacetime.

“They had more to lose, I think, and we didn’t want it to go wrong, because it was something we all really wanted. It was something everyone was afraid to dream of, and then it was happening, so it’s scarier in a way, the idea of losing that.”