I'd almost given up on TV sit-coms, in fact the last one I really enjoyed was "The I.T. Guys" and how many years ago was that? Anyway, it was my wife who alerted me to this series and a quick look at the first two episodes of the second series found me looking up series one which she'd already watched and I have to say she wasn't wrong, as I found it absolutely hilarious.
It reminded me of so many of my favourite sit-coms, like "Father Ted", naturally, "Press Gang" and yes, "The I.T. Guys", but it still has its own identity. Set in early 1990's Derry in Northern Ireland before the Good Friday Agreement came into place, it concerns the misadventures of a group of five young friends, four female and Irish, one male and English and by extension their eccentric families.
It makes clever use of the political and religious backdrop for the comedy, the families in question being Roman Catholics living in the predominantly Protestant town of Derry, so that one episode has the hapless family attempting to head for a weekend in the country while an Orange Walk is in full swing, while another sees the young gang claim to have had holy visions in a chapel, with a statue of the Virgin Mary apparently "smirking" at them.
The situations are amusingly set up, but it's the rapid-fire gags, often near-the-knuckle, which had me creasing myself as well as the individual characterisations themselves. I don't know who my favourite is amongst them but the central character of Erin, with her teenage crushes, literary pretensions and down-to-earth sensibilities probably shades it, although the hormonally imbalanced Michelle, uber-enthusiastic Clare and ditzy Orla and doormat James run her close and all get their share of the good lines on offer, not to mention their dysfunctional parents and grandparents too.
All the episodes I've watched were of the same high standard with the only difficulty sometimes being the machine-gun-like Northern Irish delivery which can be a bit hard to pick up sometimes. That said I'm getting more than enough laughs from what I can see and hear so I'm not complaining too much.
To all those many millions more people currently watching the appallingly bad "Mrs Brown's Boys" do yourself a favour and switch to this immediately.
