Arminta Wallace meets the star of Paul Mercier's shrewd new comedy drama for TG4
The swing of the ponytail is familiar. So are the quizzical expression, the wide eyes and the perfect skin. After watching just one episode of Aifric, TG4's new comedy drama for teenagers, I have no trouble recognising Clíona Ní Chiosáin as she walks into the bar of the Lucan Spa Hotel, in west Co Dublin, with her mum. Other people in the bar are too engrossed in Champions League football to take much notice, but if this 13-part series takes off in a big way, the 16-year-old actor, who plays the hapless eponymous heroine, will soon be getting recognised all over the place.
In the first episode Aifric and her family are settling into their new home, in Connemara. Or, at least, Aifric is trying to settle in, despite the best efforts of her hippy-dippy mother, her accountant and wannabe-rock-star father and her extraordinarily weird little brother, who's into mantra-chanting and macrobiotic food, to scupper her chances of a social life. Which is already in grave danger thanks to the machinations of Aifric's new classmates: beautiful, bitchy Claudia and her henchwomen.
As might be expected from Paul Mercier, the series' director and script editor, Aifric combines shrewd social observation with an appealingly zany lightness of touch. It has a clever soundtrack made up of both music of the moment and a specially composed score. There are tongue-in-cheek nods to Grange Hill, Home and Away - check out those school uniforms - and Father Ted. If the first episode is anything to go by, however, Aifric has a quirkiness all its own.
Part of this, Mercier explains, comes from the decision to set the series in Connemara. "It was almost like we created a world which is neither east coast nor west coast but a world unto itself," he says. "But it's a real world, not a virtual one. For lots of people the experience of living east and going west for the summer, or vice versa, is part of our identity in Ireland. "
So, as Aifric's family rushes headlong along the manic path that is everyday life nowadays, there's an utterly gorgeous backdrop that nobody even notices: the Co Galway coast. Teenagers, as Mercier points out, don't look at the scenery. "They don't have the slightest interest. But if a comb goes missing, or somebody has taken somebody else's mascara, there's hell to pay."
Telegael, which made Aifric for TG4, began work on the series in January 2004. With the help of funding from the Broadcasting Commission of Ireland, as well as from the Irish Film Board and section-481 tax breaks, Mercier brought 1,500 Irish-speaking teenagers, many of them with little or no acting experience, to Galway for a series of workshops. "We spent a year and a half, at least, choosing who would do what," he says.
The first challenge was to get the youngsters to work as a group. "Self-consciousness is a powerful factor in young people, and if it tilts in the wrong direction it can really destroy them, you know? It inhibits the creativity which I believe is already there. If they're self-conscious they don't release it.
"The key to that is getting them to know one another and be comfortable with one another. We had certain rules: basically, respect among themselves and none of this competitive nonsense. We needed to work on that for a while. Then it was a question of getting them used to doing things in front of a camera and developing a style."
Being in front of the camera for the first time was an experience that Ní Chiosáin -who says she might have acted in a school play when she was 11 but can't remember - will never forget. "I couldn't stop staring into it," she says. "It was like, omigod, it's looking at me - you know? I just got used to it, I guess. And then, this summer, half the time I wouldn't even realise it was there. I remember, when they showed us the first episode, I got so freaked out, because I didn't even realise they were filming me sometimes."
But then - she shrugs a delightfully upbeat version of the de rigueur teenage shrug - when she signed up for the workshop she never expected to end up on television. "I made so many friends. It was fantastic. There's nothing negative I can say about this summer."
And in her other life - real life - she's embarking on fifth year, with its sombre promises of the Leaving Cert to come. Acting bug or not, she's working towards a career as a primary teacher. "I'll have to work hard, but that's what I really, really want to do."
• Aifric begins on TG4 on Thursday, November 2nd, at 5pm