The smash-hit comedy Derry Girls is back tonight (Tuesday) for its third and final series. It's been a massive success, and a surprising one in many ways.
After all, Northern Ireland is a country with a population of fewer than two million people. And a very small proportion of those were schoolgirls in the mid to late 1990s.
In truth, there are universal themes in the programme - teenage awkwardness, embarrassing families and hormonal clashes with the opposite sex. But for me, relating to the girls of Our Lady Immaculate College is easy, as I was pretty much one of them.
The series writer Lisa McGee is in her early 40s, as am!, and she clearly mined her own experiences of a family living in NI against the spectre of The Troubles.
Growing up in Northern Ireland, I lived about an hour away from Derry/Londonderry. The Troubles cast a pall over our schooldays but, as in the programme, the gallows humour helped us to deal with military presence, headline violence and some pretty nasty politics - and come out the other side relatively unscathed.
Against the backdrop of actual events of the Troubles and the peace process, it was a time of seeing our country on the nightly news, regularly seeing armed police in armoured Land Rovers and being stopped at British Army checkpoints.
The series has already covered the girls' reaction to the 1994 IRA ceasefire announcement and the 1995 visit to Northern Ireland of President Bill Clinton and First Lady Hillary Clinton. But the genius of McGee is that she's shown it as it was for teenagers.
Bombs and guns, yes, but also The Cranberries, The X Files, Nirvana and Wayne’s World, frizzy perms and bomber jackets, whether the school ride was giving you any notice and what lies you had to tell your parents to get out on the weekend. Here's where the Derry Girls experience was so much like mine - and that of my friends.
The look
Not quite the decade that taste forgot, but the scrunch-dried perms and grown-out fringes are all too familiar. For me, add to that dodgy dye jobs - thanks to my mum and much to the anger of the head of girls at my school - and weirdly zero knowledge of make-up until I was about 19.
The clothes themselves are amazingly accurate, with Erin's double denim, Claire's Converse and Doctor Martins and flowery dresses. The grunge look didn't leave NI until I did in 1998, as the candid picture of me above shows.
The language
Obviously everywhere in the UK has its own vernacular, and fashionable phrases come and go. But, like hearing Superintendent Ted Hastings on BBC's Line of Duty intoning the immortal NI phrase "Now we're sucking diesel", the Derry Girls' vocabulary chimes so closely to my own.
If you're in need of a glossary to help out, here are the 10 most-used phrases from my schooldays that the Derry Girls also use liberally.
Boke: Throw up
Catch yourself on: Don’t be daft
Class: Excellent
Craic: Can be fun - 'let's have some craic' - but also news 'tell us yer craic'. Pronounced 'crack'
Eejit: Idiot
Hi: Added to the end of many a sentence for no purpose “No problem hi”
Ra: The IRA, or Irish Republican Army
Raging: Angry
Ride: To have sex
Wise up: Grow up
The music
Are you even Northern Irish if you haven't gone to an indie disco and moshed to Zombie by the Cranberries followed by Girl From Mars by Ash? Add in a little Irish pop a la B*Witched and Boyzone and you could be back perched by the hi-fi in the lounge trying to ignore your dad while you recorded your favourite songs off Atlantic 252 (Irish radio station).
The humour
It's clear there is nothing funny about terrorism. But McGee's scripts bring out the humour and the camaraderie of these teenagers who are funny and, notably, self-obsessed. Witness the aforementioned day when I was stopped at an Army checkpoint as I was learning to drive. I was so scared that I didn't take the handbrake fully off in my haste to leave, and only noticed when my dad smelled burning about three miles up the road.
Or the time me and my sister skived off school to get the train to Dublin for the day - only to be taken off and put on buses before the border because there was a bomb scare on the line. My 'cack attack' wasn't about the possibility of being involved in an explosion - it was being on the news and having my English teacher see me and give me detention.
No Facebook
How often I have thanked my lucky stars that we didn't live in an age of social media. No one was sharing unflattering pics of you before the night out was even over - and there was no texting to land you in hot water when someone saw something they shouldn't.
Derry Girls season 3 starts on Tuesday, April 12 at 9.15pm on Channel 4, or you can catch up on All4
