Derry Girls creator talks new Netflix show How to Get to Heaven from Belfast: "You can't separate us from what's happened here"
Following her BAFTA-winning Derry Girls, Lisa McGee is pivoting to something a bit creepier – but with friends, laughter and fun at its core.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.
If you ever catch an Irish brunette staring as you argue with friends, beware: it might be Lisa McGee, and she might write you into her next comedy.
McGee’s huge hit Derry Girls, about a group of teenagers growing up during the Troubles, hit the mark with viewers thanks to its precise and hilarious observations about the way family and friends often talk to each other. And while writing her new series, which also follows a group of bickering pals, McGee admits she takes a lot of inspiration from real life.
“I love watching people argue,” she says. “I have a group of close friends from school and when we go away together, I just listen. The arguments are unbelievably funny.”
While McGee changes and embellishes the real-life stories she hears – and usually asks permission – she admits getting into trouble once when she forgot to tell a friend she was pinching her story about a family feud.
“My friend was like, ‘Lisa, what the hell?’ But I just go, ‘Well, you shouldn’t tell me’. Everyone knows it’s all up for grabs, my mum especially. You can see it dawning on her as she’s telling me a story and she’ll go, ‘Don’t you dare’. With my mum – tough. I’ll use it anyway.”
Her new series, How to Get to Heaven from Belfast, has the same DNA as Derry Girls but is edgier, according to McGee. And that’s not the only difference – rather than a six-part sitcom this is an eight-part thriller going out on Netflix, which means a bigger budget than Derry Girls had on Channel 4.
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The plot revolves around three school friends now in their 30s – Saoirse, Dara and Robyn – who discover their fourth friend has died suddenly. They haven’t seen Greta since school and when they go to her wake, they realise the cause of her death may not be all it seems. Soon, they’ve stumbled into investigating what really happened while facing up to their own past lives – and lies.
The idea came to 45-year-old McGee when she visited her old school in Derry, which had been derelict for 20 years and become a favourite location for ghost hunters. “It was really weird,” she says. “There were school skirts hanging up and writing on blackboards. I was walking down a little path and I got this freaky feeling I was going to bump into myself as a teenage girl. I didn’t, but it made me ask, what would she think of me and my choices? That’s where the idea started.
“As you get older, I think you go back to the true person you were. I was a little girl that just liked writing and the older I get, the closer I get to that person, because she had it all worked out, actually. The death of their friend shakes these women and connects them to the teenagers they once were, and that spirit they thought they’d lost. It’s about friendship and self-discovery.”
While Derry Girls was an out-and-out comedy set around a very specific area and time (the mid-1990s), How to Get to Heaven from Belfast is much harder to place tonally. It’s certainly a very funny thriller, but it also includes moments that are fantastical, spooky and heartfelt. Aware of how bonkers it may sound, I tentatively ask McGee if the likes of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca and the cartoon Scooby-Doo were influences on the show…
“I love you!” she laughs. “Scooby-Doo was our biggest reference, and people thought I was mad. The director Michael Lennox and I would go, ‘Let’s make it 30 per cent more Scooby-Doo’. We wrote a list of unhinged references. And yes, Rebecca is one of my favourite books. The A-Team was also in there, Murder, She Wrote, Father Ted. I’ve got away with doing two insane shows, and no one’s stopped me. I count myself so lucky.”
It’s a more complicated series with more money behind it, and as the follow-up to the BAFTA-and Emmy-winning success of Derry Girls, I assume McGee must have felt pressured to deliver another hit. But when I put this to her, McGee says she felt far less pressure than during the third series of Derry Girls, which ended with a poignant episode about the Good Friday Agreement.
“Derry Girls started to feel like it wasn’t mine,” she says. “I really felt I had to deliver, because it wasn’t just for me any more, it had become this thing people were invested in. With this, I’m not representing a big moment in history, or my town or my people. I’m just trying to tell a banging story.
“I’ll be disappointed if people don’t enjoy it, but it’s not the same level of scrutiny as Derry Girls. It’s been quite freeing. I had to not be the Derry Girls writer, because it could cripple you to be worrying about that.”
As in Derry Girls, the protagonists in How to Get to Heaven from Belfast are a varied group: Saoirse is a high-flying writer based in London; Dara is a gay Catholic who lives at home with her mother and sister; and Robyn is a glamorous, stressed mum. McGee agrees they could absolutely be seen as grown-up versions of Erin, Orla, Clare and Michelle, but says she didn’t find herself slipping into repeating jokes or cadences from Derry Girls.
“I love writing about female friends,” she says, “but the thriller aspect meant I couldn’t do some of the cartoonish stuff I would have done in Derry Girls. The stakes are higher for these women because they’ve got careers, kids or a mum to look after – stakes that Michelle and Erin didn’t have. I also found myself, for the first time, stripping out a lot of jokes because they detracted from the tension. That would have been unthinkable on Derry Girls.”
How to Get to Heaven from Belfast may not tackle as serious a storyline as the Good Friday Agreement, but it doesn’t shy away from jokes that are close to the knuckle. One gag has the women breaking down after filling the car up with the wrong type of petrol, to which a Garda [police officer] from the Republic of Ireland tells the Northern Irish women, “It’s not like you lot to waste petrol.” There are also running jokes about Dara having “an attack of the Catholics” every time she feels guilty.
Still, McGee says she knows where to draw the line to avoid upsetting her Northern Irish compatriots. “You can’t separate us from what’s happened here, you just can’t. It never really goes away, and I think it can be funny.”
However, she does concede that there are subjects that are definitely off limits since becoming a mother (she has two young sons with writer husband, Tobias Beer). “Being a mum, with all the crazy and chaos, is good for comedy,” she says. “There’s more I can write and access now. But there are certain topics I won’t go near because they’re just too dark.
“When people write well about things like sexual violence, it’s very important, but there needs to be space for women to just enjoy and laugh and have escapism. I was a very silly person when I wrote Derry Girls, and a very hopeful person, so everything was positive. It could still have been a brilliant show written by someone else, but it might have been bleaker.
“I want people to come away from my shows feeling a wee bit better about things. My characters are never cool, they’re always eejits. I think people respond to that: my characters make people feel a bit better. I’m very comfortable writing silly women being silly.”
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How to Get to Heaven from Belfast arrives on Netflix on Thursday 12 February.
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