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.”
