‘Nowhere to hide’: Regionalism and memory in Lisa McGee’s Derry Girls

Abstract

Derry Girls (2018‐present) playfully satirizes regionalism and first-person narrative while re-enacting a collective memory of the Troubles. A close reading of the series’ opening montage provides the basis for a fuller understanding of the programme’s nuanced critique of efforts to look back on Northern Ireland in the 1990s and make sense of it all with the benefit of hindsight. In lieu of the reassurances of authoritative extradiegetic commentary, the series’ opening monologue provides a humorous account of the unresolved tribulations of adolescence and, in the larger political frame, a community’s continuing inability to situate itself as a region within the United Kingdom.