“It’s fucking tiny.” Road Movies, Youth and Immobility in Derry Girls (2018–)

Abstract

Derry Girls (2018–present), Channel 4’s major success since Max and Paddy’s Road to Nowhere (2004), is a teen sitcom set in pre-ceasefire Northern Ireland which inevitably brings issues such as place and space to the fore by relying on teen drama tropes. This is particularly visible in “The Concert”, Derry Girls’ third episode in season two, directed by Michael Lennox and written Lisa McGee, an episode where the dominant tropes are those of a road movie but genuinely overturned upside down. Such a subversion will be directly connected to notions of space, identity and containment during the Troubles in the 1990s, as well as youth, gender, ethnicity and class divides.