‘I’ll never grow up!’ Derry Girls’ Lisa McGee on comedy, class and her new show Skint

Lisa McGee: ‘There’s a punk attitude to teenage girls in Derry. They’ve got a very bold sense of humour.’ Photograph: Linda Nylind/The Guardian

When Lisa McGee was a kid in Derry in the 90s, she swore she would never write about Northern Ireland, least of all about the Troubles. She wanted to write Murder She Wrote, or better still, to grow up and become its heroine, the author turned detective Jessica Fletcher. “I just thought her life was class. She lived in this beautiful place and she wrote novels really easily because she had all this time to solve murders as well.”

Now McGee, 40, has got the fairytale for real that Jessica Fletcher had on screen, minus the murders. “Taxi drivers and Sainsbury’s delivery men will go: ‘Are you the Lisa McGee that writes Derry Girls?’ And I’ll have come to the door in my pyjamas. Occasionally in Murder She Wrote, someone would come over and go: ‘Are you the Jessica Fletcher? And now it’s like that for me.”