After you make a hit like Derry Girls, what then? Lisa McGee’s Channel 4 comedy, which charted the lives of a gang of gobby girls and one wee English fella at a convent school during the Troubles, aired from 2018 to 2022 and became the most-watched series in Northern Ireland since records began. But it travelled, too. Martin Scorsese is among its famous fans – “Those nuns!” he marvelled. It made stars of the cast, from Nicola Coughlan to Siobhan McSweeney. And its final season won three Baftas and an Emmy – with the very last episode, about the Good Friday Agreement, praised for teaching English viewers more about that moment in history than any lesson ever did. Following that, you’d surely be feeling under a bit of pressure when writing your next show. How do you match it? But the woman behind it all, Lisa McGee, wasn’t losing too much sleep.
“To be really honest, I’d had that pressure already with the final episode of Derry Girls,” she says, shaking her head in a way that says “never again”. “I felt sick waiting to see what the response would be to that. Oh God, it just felt like, if I got it wrong, I was disappointing people on a level that was greater than a sitcom.” With her new show, Netflix’s How to Get to Heaven from Belfast, she felt she was “just allowed to go back and tell a story again”. “Don’t get me wrong, I will be feeling physically sick on 12 February when it goes out, but I’m not worried I’ll be letting people down, I just feel like people will either like it or they won’t.”
There’s a lot for fans of Derry Girls to like in How to Get to Heaven from Belfast. Once again, it’s led by a group of funny female friends (but this time, it’s three dysfunctional women in their late thirties). Again, it’s got a banging soundtrack (but swap out The Cranberries for Nelly and Girls Aloud). And again, the action is set in Northern Ireland (but very much the modern-day version, a place where priests are limiting their contact hours in a bid to attain “work-life balance”).
The key difference this time, though, is that while Derry Girls was more of an out-and-out comedy, How to Get to Heaven is a mystery thriller with jokes thrown in. Our leads, Roisin Gallagher’s screenwriter Saoirse, Sinéad Keenan’s chaotic mum Robyn and Caoilfhionn Dunne’s carer Dara, are on a mission. After they are alerted to the death of the estranged fourth member of their childhood friendship group, they end up on an odyssey through Ireland and beyond, as they try to piece together the truth of their collective past and present. They make for hapless detectives, arguing about eyelash extensions – “They look like tarantulas” – and accidentally signing off phone calls with “love you, bye!” when chasing potential leads.
“I think the genre shift was really good,” says McGee, “because it helped me get out of the Derry Girls frame of mind.” She found herself stripping gags out of the script at the eleventh hour, to ensure the show didn’t feel too much like a comedy, and still had dramatic stakes. “I was like, ‘This goes against everything I believe in, taking laughs out,’” she remembers, “but it was really good for me because it got me out of this headspace I’d been in for years.”
That said, there is a lot of Derry Girls DNA in How to Get to Heaven’s comedic moments. When Saoirse won’t stop daydreaming over a hunky policeman, Robyn brings her crashing back down to earth. “Ach, why don’t you just ride him and get it out of your system Saoirse!” she snaps. At another point, Robyn berates her friend for having “an attack of the Catholics” – read: being too honest. It’s just the kind of thing that would’ve flown off the tongue of the most acerbic Derry Girl, Michelle.
And then there’s the line delivery, the snowballing nature of the jokes, which is signature McGee. “I love how the rhythm of that kind of comedy builds,” says the writer, speaking over video call from Belfast. “I always say this to the actors: ‘If you pause, it’s dead.’ It’s nearly only funny if you get the speed behind it and sometimes the faster they go, the funnier it gets, and the lines haven’t changed.”
Her cast, chatting over Zoom a couple of days later, agree. “It goes at quite a lick,” says Keenan. “I’ve worked with Lisa a few times, and that’s one thing that she always carries through, that very particular Northern Irish sense of humour. It works at pace. You don’t leave gaps for breath, unless you absolutely need to breathe.”
McGee, who turned 45 last summer, found that centring her show on a trio of women nearing 40 was ripe storytelling territory. “When you’re approaching 40, people just go mad,” she laughs. “You think everything needs to happen and your career, relationship, family life all need to be perfect, and then you hit 40, and you’re like, ‘Oh, it’s just exactly the same as it was before.’”
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Dunne, in her early forties, can relate. “You feel a bit mad, and you know what’s coming down the road is more madness and hot flushes and all sorts,” she says. “And you’re kind of a grown-up, but you don’t want to be. It’s that middle period of your life, when you’re about to become something you’re terrified of becoming.”
For McGee, a lot of life happened when she was in her late thirties. She had both her sons, who are now 10 and six. At 38, she had her big break with Derry Girls. And after lockdown, she moved from London back to Belfast with her English actor husband, Tobias Beer. When we speak, she is hiding in an office, “where my children can’t get near me and I can talk in full sentences, hopefully, without being disturbed”.
She wrote some of her own experience of rearing sons into How to Get to Heaven, through Keenan’s character Robyn. She may be immaculately coiffed at all times, but her life is far from plain sailing, and Keenan’s performance is delightfully unhinged at points. “Don’t f*** about with a mum of boys!” she screams. Keenan has two sons, too, so it wasn’t a stretch to get into Robyn’s mindset. “Ellie,” she says, fixing me with the look of a woman traumatised, “it is as chaotic as chaos can get. They are two feral boys. I love them dearly, but I’m just outnumbered in my house. It was fun to channel all that frustration and to be able to lose my rag as Robyn, because, you know,” – she raises a playful eyebrow – “you can’t do that in real life.”
McGee channelled frustrations around the other great love of her life, screenwriting, into Saoirse. Gallagher’s character is the showrunner of a smash-hit crime thriller that critics love but she’s grown to hate, with a demanding cast who constantly question her script, and adoring fans who send her “psychotic” storyline ideas. When I ask if McGee has received letters like this, she chooses not to answer directly, instead putting her head in her hands. “Oh my God, I’d forgotten that was in there!” she says, slightly guiltily. “But I think the problem for Saoirse is that, unlike me, she doesn’t like the show she’s writing. I always thought that, like, what if you finally had a hit, and you didn’t actually like it? I was very lucky because the thing I wrote that people connected to was about my hometown. But yes, I was able to vent a lot about things. A lot of those got cut out of the script though.”
For Gallagher, playing Saoirse meant the actor got to see the experience of making TV from the writer’s perspective. “It was totally hilarious,” she says. “There’s a scene where we see Saoirse bombarded with questions, and I really thought, oh God, is this what it’s like for the showrunner? It’s a brilliant observation on the chaos and high octane level of making telly.” Does she think, knowing what she does now, that she’ll be a better-behaved and lower-maintenance cast member? She cracks up. “Absolutely not.”
When I speak to McGee, it’s a couple of days after Matt Damon made headlines for saying that, these days, screenwriters are explicitly being advised to accommodate so-called “second-screen viewers”, and reiterate plot points so that those scrolling their phones while watching don’t miss what’s going on. McGee insists she hasn’t been asked to do this yet, but finds the prospect “hugely depressing”. “You can tell, watching some shows, where it’s really obvious, and they’re telling you exactly what just happened two minutes ago, or they’re flashing to it, and it’s frustrating.”
But she’s optimistic that viewers will seek out more nourishing TV. “There are audiences who want to be challenged and not spoon-fed like that,” she says. “I think you’ll start to see people navigating towards shows that are a wee bit more complex.” Well, we know that McGee’s shows at least, from Derry Girls to How to Get to Heaven, go at “quite a lick”. So you’d better concentrate.
‘How to Get to Heaven from Belfast’ is out now on Netflix
