Derry Girls episode 2, review: Iconoclastic sitcom that deserves its growing reputation

As good as ‘Father Ted’, reckons Sean O’Grady

“Creepy wee f****er, isn’t he?” remarks Michelle (Jamie-Lee O’Donnell), a little shockingly and blasphemously when she comes face to face with a statue of Our Lord in the principal’s office. It’s a fairly typical piece of dialogue in a show that continually presses its adolescent nose against the stained glass of acceptable post-watershed sectarian, political and religious language.

That the show is set in 1990s Derry/Londonderry during the Troubles makes this nose-pressing an even greater challenge than usual, but writer Lisa McGee judges it right. Derry Girls (Channel 4) deserves its reputation as the best thing to come out of Ireland/Northern Ireland since St Patrick banished the snakes in the fifth century AD. Or at least since the much-missed Father Ted. I like to think of it as compensation for Mrs Brown’s Boys.

I confess (I suppose that is an appropriate term in this context) that despite my extensive exposure to Roman Catholic iconography, I had never known the correct name for the odd statuette in question, that of a toddler Jesus incongruously dressed in sumptuous regal robes with a dirty great crown on his head, not a Pamper in sight.

Thanks to Derry Girls, and specifically the principal of Our Lady Immaculate College, Sister Michael (Siobhan McSweeney), I now realise it is the “enchanting child of Prague”, and this “beautiful piece of religious art” has been bestowed by the Bishop on the Derry Girls’ school.

But Michelle, Erin, Clare and the rest of the Derry Girls, plus an English boy cousin James (Dylan Llewellyn), are on a mission to kidnap the son of God, no less. They sneak into Sister Michael’s office when they know she is at judo class (learning rather than instructing, though she’s tough enough for that, alright). They then squabble, and what you could see coming transpired – the Infant of Prague is dropped and his head breaks away from his wee body, so it does.

Decapitating the Lamb of God is usually not the luckiest thing to do, and so it proves. A literal iconoclasm, I suppose, and superbly, erm, executed.

They are discovered by Sister Michael but, in an improbable collaboration, they superglue his head back on, upside down, and pretend nothing untoward happened. As say it is all a bit predictable, but charming and very funny nonetheless.

The cause of the attempted abduction was the supposed sacking by Sister Michael of the new, radical English teacher, Ms S De Brun (Judith Roddy). Baby Jesus was to be returned when Ms De Brun was reinstated. Ms De Brun takes an inspirational approach to literature reminiscent of Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society, but with added smouldering sex appeal from the moment she turns up in her motorcycle leathers and smoky eye shadow, and tosses her luscious locks around the staid old panelled corridors.

She stimulates the girls’ imagination with her racy ways, and gives them the task of writing literature: “Great poetry is raw and messy and glorious and ugly and dragged from the depths of the soul.” She rescues them from the poverty of imagination that, in the case of goody-goody Jenny Joyce (Leah O’Rourke) results in doggerel as bad as this: “Some flowers are tall/ Some flowers are small/ Some flowers barely grow at all.”

Anyhow, it turns out Ms De Brun, the rebel, hadn’t been fired by the reactionary Sister Michael, but just gone for more pay at St Dominic’s, and was in fact flawed icon: a bit like the infant of Prague after the Derry Girls had done with the wee fella. God will forgive them.