The Irish women making TV's best comedies

From Channel 4's Derry Girls to RTE's Nowhere Fast, female-led Irish comedies are coming thick and fast. We talk to the people behind them, and ask if they can help drive societal change.

GameFace review

Roisin Conaty's thirtysomething heroine is directionless, enthusiastic and, above all, funny.

GameFace is the funniest sitcom of the year - review

So how about that bold claim that GameFace is 2017's best new homegrown sitcom? Well, its only serious rivals have been Mitchell and Webb's Back, parenting satire Motherland and rural mockumentary This Country. GameFace arguably out-laughed and out-charmed them all. It even ended on a sweetly optimistic note. Let's hope the second series doesn't take another three years.

GameFace review

Ultimately, your enjoyment of GameFace will hinge on whether you empathise with Marcella's irresponsible, self-involved persona.

GameFace, which had its pilot in 2014, has been commissioned as a series, which is good news for writer and star Roisin Conaty and for us. Oh, it's not something we've not seen before. Shambolic thirtysomething singleton drinks too much, eats too much cake, reads self-help books - it's more scatological than Miranda, less whimperingly funny than Fleabag, but firmly in that part of the spectrum. Yet Conaty still has the ability to pull something truly leftfield from nowhere, such as the nice, if overdone, gag about the guy who had, somehow, never seen Friends. Immensely likable, surprisingly moreish.

GameFace, a tragicomic portrait of a life unravelled

The English standup has created a big-hearted comedy that manages to make depression and loneliness funny.

Preview - GameFace

Sitcom GameFace originally began as a pilot back in 2014 and has only just now been given a full series on E4.

Gameface preview

It's probably impossible to review Roisin Conaty's Gameface without mentioning the F-word: Fleabag.