Ian McElhinney

Granda Joe has decided that Gerry is at fault, and the lack of evidence does not trouble him. In Derry Girls (2018), Ian McElhinney makes that unreasonable hostility a dependable pleasure, helped by Tommy Tiernan's Gerry, who knows he has done nothing wrong and that the campaign will never end. We laughed because Gerry has done nothing to deserve any of this, and Joe carries on regardless. McElhinney gives him enough weight for the bullying to register, without making him too forbidding for the comedy.

That family authority fits a career spent largely in supporting parts, stretching back to the early 1980s. He is often cast as officers, detectives and grandfathers, people accustomed to having a say. His Belfast detective in Michael Collins (1996) and Ser Barristan Selmy in Game of Thrones (2011) belong to that pattern. The latter series brought him wider recognition. With Joe, that familiar casting gives the comedy a head start: we recognise the family elder and then discover how badly he behaves.

In Lisa McGee's sitcom, the adults have less time than the teenagers to make themselves known, which suits a performer who can establish a patriarch without much explanation. Tiernan supplies the patience that makes Joe's antagonism funny; the exchange needs both actors. Siobhán McSweeney's Sister Michael gets the biggest laughs with the least movement, and McElhinney works well within that company rather than demanding every scene. Our reservation about the series is its repetitive plotting, not these tightly drawn adults, who can make an old grievance worth hearing again.

That familiarity has a limit, since another production may need only someone who looks entitled to give orders. His brief appearance as General Dodonna in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016) offers much less room for the particularity that makes Joe worth watching. We would welcome more parts that let him be difficult for such small, comprehensible reasons. Start with Derry Girls; another uniform can wait.