London Irish

I love this show! Great writing and acting. Wish there were more episodes!

If Lisa McGee is writing it, I'm watching it. This show is absurd, laugh-out-loud funny, pathetic, somewhat revolting & just wonderful viewing! You can see the relationship between this show & the equally hysterical Derry Girls (another Lisa McGee creation) in the writing & characters. In fact two of the actors have appeared in episodes of Derry Girls. I hate that there were only 6 episodes.

Lobe this show! So funny and each character has something brilliant about them and is equally funny. Just superb, however when I started watching it on Prime the photo has Season One on it implying there would be more so I was disappointed to discover only the 6 episodes existed. Definitely worth a watch. One review here said that it was like It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia gone wrong but I couldn't disagree more, not only is it nothing like it but I persevered with quite a bit of It's Always Sunny and at best only found it mildly amusing.

I was a latecomer to London Irish. This a series written by the same team responsible for the current UK smash Derry Girls. Like me, many others have enjoyed Derry Girls and are keen to discover other work by the same writer. This series was slated by the press at the time which is why its a mainly forgotten UK comedy series. However it appears to me that the dislike is mainly to do with snobbery from people who lack the life experience to understand how realistic the show actually is. There are very few shows which deal with working class heavy drinking culture which is a big part of Scottish and Irish life. The cast are seen drinking, getting drunk, smoking and swearing heavily which is obviously too much for the genteel middle class reviewers who basically view themselves as superior as they would never behave this way. The reality is this is a show which is reflective of many 20 somethings who come from this culture and who have no middle class aspirations. Its a very funny show but its obviously aimed at a similar audience that Trainspotting was, its simply written for a specific audience. While it does have similarities to Derry Girls, its basically DG with less swearing, drinking etc and with a supposedly older cast. I say this as the cast of DG are in their 20s and 30s! You could argue that London Irish are the Derry Girls and boys after they have left school and relocated to London. London Irish looks like it will have a second life after the success of Derry Girls and rightfully so. If you are the sort of person who looks down their nose at drinking, smoking and swearing this isn't for you and simply doesn't have to be.

London Irish centres on the daily drinking habits of four Northern Irish housemates living in London, inspired by the writer's own experiences. Although aspects of the four characters' daily lives enter in to the show every now and again (i.e. going to work), the show is driven almost exclusively by the group's pre-drinking shenanigans and post-drinking headaches. The comedy relies predominantly on the characters playing off each other's wildly different personalities. For instance, Conor's mind-bending lunacy acts as the perfect foil to his sister's, Bronagh's, inexhaustible aggression. Alternatively, Niamh's attitudes towards sex and men, which would be viewed as inexcusably sinister had they been expressed by a male character, are rendered comically creepy by the fact that they are delivered by an extremely petite, sweet-looking girl. While the actor playing Packy seems to have been cast mainly as eye-candy, he is also the most relatable of the characters, being the one who most often attempts to explain Conor or Niamh's idiocy to them. Although the show plays on Irish and English stereotypes quite considerably, the show parodies a drinking culture that most UK viewers will be familiar with. Foul-language and politically incorrect statements are commonplace, so any viewers anticipating the restrained, frustrated, socially awkward comedy of Father Ted (broadly implied by casting Ardal O'Hanlon) will be in for a shock. Altogether the show has many laugh-out-loud-moments and is just generally good fun.