Channel 4 returns to Derry Girls

Derry Girls was C4’s biggest comedy launch in five years

Channel 4 (C4) in the UK has recommissioned Derry Girls, its comedy series set in Northern Ireland during The Troubles, for a 6×30′ second season.

The new run was ordered by Ian Katz, the broadcaster’s recently arrived director of programmes, and head of comedy Fiona McDermott.

The first episode of Derry Girls was C4’s biggest comedy series launch in almost five years when it aired earlier this month. The episode has racked up 2.5 million viewers so far.

Created by writer Lisa McGee, the show is set against the backdrop of The Troubles and follows a group of young people as they navigate their teens in the city of Derry in the early 1990s. It is produced by Hat Trick Productions in Northern Ireland and has received funding from Northern Ireland Screen.

“Derry Girls is a blast of fresh air. It’s everything we want from Channel 4 comedy: young, warm, brimming with new talent and rooted in an underrepresented part of the country,” said Katz.

Caroline Leddy (The Inbetweeners, Friday Night Dinner, London Irish), Liz Lewin (London Irish, Crashing, My Mad Fat Diary) and Jimmy Mulville are executive producers of the show.

C4 has also greenlit a 1×60’ documentary to mark Holocaust Memorial Day.

The specialist factual team at C4 has commissioned Caravan to make Holocaust: The Revenge (1×60’), which will be shopped internationally as Avenging Evil by coproduction partner Global Road.

The doc tells the story of a secret organisation of Holocaust survivors known as the Avengers who attempted to carry out the ultimate act of revenge in 1946: the indiscriminate murder of six million Germans as retribution for the six million Jews killed by the Nazis.

The Avengers planned to poison the water supplies in four major German cities – Hamburg, Nuremberg, Frankfurt and Munich – and were led by a survivor of the Vilnius Ghetto, Abba Kovner, who later became a famous Israeli poet.