Father Ted first aired 30 years ago on Monday, on April 21st, 1995. By the time the 25th and final episode was broadcast, on May 1st, 1998, it had been canonised as one of the funniest TV sitcoms of all time, identifiably Irish but anything but parochial.
Its memorable lines have become catchphrases and memes, its three series are eternally repeated, converting new generations, and an annual Tedfest still attracts hundreds of devotees dressed up as characters from the show.
Such success was not preordained. Even Ardal O’Hanlon, who played Fr Dougal McGuire, had doubts about a sitcom featuring three Irish priests banished to the godforsaken parish of Craggy Island and kept afloat on a sea of tea by their housekeeper, Mrs Doyle.
Fr Dougal was his first serious role, I say, then check myself – obviously it’s a comedy – but O’Hanlon agrees. “Comedy is serious.” He first acted as the Ophelia character Owen in Hamlet and Her Brothers, Ferdia Mac Anna’s take on Shakespeare for RTÉ.
“Apparently that’s where Arthur and Graham” – Arthur Mathews and Graham Linehan, Father Ted’s creators and writers – “saw the first inkling that I might be Dougal, combined with my stand-up. I was in about two scenes and didn’t know what I was doing, but they obviously saw enough to give them a glimmer. It’s such a cliche, but it’s true: there is no such thing as a small role.”
What did he bring? “A naivety, one of those south Co Dublin airheads, someone who has no self-awareness.”
O’Hanlon had spoken to the writers after stand-up shows in Dublin, and they had mentioned he might be suitable for the sitcom, “but I thought it was a sh*t idea. Who in England is going to want to watch a sitcom about Irish priests? It wasn’t something I was remotely excited about.”
He had moved to London in February 1994. “It was a very exciting, kaleidoscopic time, the middle of the Blair years. There was prosperity, optimism, a cultural renaissance, Cool Britannia, Britpop. And comedy was absolutely exploding.
“It happened very quickly for me. I won a few competitions, got a lot of work. Comedians were being plucked from the circuit to front chatshows. The day I went for my Father Ted audition I was also asked to audition for a role as roving reporter on The Big Breakfast, and I got that. It was a toss-up: which do I do? But my focus was stand-up. Even Father Ted was a distraction.
[ The secret lives of the priests in Father TedOpens in new window ]
“I got a call from Arthur Mathews at half four one day saying this is our last day of casting: could I come in? I had a show that night so wasn’t even sure I could make it. I read Dougal; I think Arthur read Ted. Arthur and Graham were laughing away, but the others were stony-faced.
“I just slipped into it very easily. It sounded so natural in my voice. It matched my sensibility exactly. Arthur is from the same part of the world as me, the northeast, and has that same droll, deadpan, dark comedy. Pat McDonnell and Joe Rooney” – who play Eoin McLove and Fr Damo – “have it too. From day one I instinctively got it.”
Weeks later he was performing at Edinburgh Festival Fringe and got a call asking him to fly to Dublin for a “chemistry reading” with Dermot Morgan, who played Fr Ted Crilly.
“They wanted to see would we dovetail. Again that was a massive pain in the arse. I had to go and come back in the same day. It was all a stress. I didn’t think I was an actor, and it wasn’t as if I had unlimited confidence in Arthur and Graham at that stage.”
How much of his DNA is in Fr Dougal?
“Too much. It probably helped not training as an actor. I just relied on my instincts. What I kept coming back to was: how do I play this stupid Irish character? The intention was to send up that trope, to exaggerate. I didn’t want to play it out-and-out stupid. The trick I relied on was to think of a dog, someone who is loyal, obliging, lovable, energetic, always up for whatever his boss wants to do.”
He channelled two other touchstones. “My little sister Dearbhla was a good few years younger than me, very innocent – so the innocence of a child rather than stupid. And the third thing was Graham Linehan himself. I hope he takes it in the right spirit. He had this enthusiasm for comedy, almost this innocence about him, a bit of naivety and social awkwardness. If I was ever stuck for inspiration, What’s Graham doing?”
O’Hanlon’s stand-up persona back then was similarly bewildered and wide-eyed rather than gormless.
I couldn’t see how a British audience would go for it. Also, being brought up in Monaghan, you don’t think anything good is ever going to happen to you
— Ardal O'Hanlon
Because he was around the same age as the writers and they all lived in London, “I was their mate in a way Dermot and Frank” – Frank Kelly, who played Fr Jack Hackett – “weren’t. We socialised, so what would happen is you might say, ‘Wouldn’t it be funny if Mrs Doyle gave Dougal a bath?’ – just say it for the craic – but then the next series comes round and they’ve taken on the suggestion.”
There was also scope for improvisation. “The biggest joy for an actor is when you come up with something on the spot. My favourite bits are things that happened in the moment – for example, the time when Dougal doesn’t hang up the phone but just throws it down. It just seemed right.
“My favourite is the postcredit sequence of the big fight at end of the priests’ sports day, and Dougal happens upon it and just gets a rush of blood to the head and kicks a priest on the ground. It’s the boldest thing he’s ever done. You can read it on his face, the excitement and guilt.”
O’Hanlon recalls another aspect of the mid-1990s zeitgeist. “There was a huge appetite for all things Irish in London at that time. You had Riverdance, Ballykissangel, The Corrs, Graham Norton, a wave of Irish comedians, Irish theme pubs. I remember a stat: 20 per cent of British people were claiming some Irish ancestry. There was also the peace process, a thaw in relations.”
That added to the shock when the IRA broke its ceasefire with the London Docklands bombing on February 9th, 1996. A few kilometres upriver, I’d just watched O’Hanlon record an episode of the second series of Father Ted. We were in the green room when the news broke on TV, tragedy trumping farce again.
“It was devastating. We didn’t know if we could show our faces the next day. I did a gig the next night: I was verbally attacked as soon as they heard my Irish accent, but I was overwhelmed by the support from the rest of the crowd. English people are fair, by and large.”
[ Father Ted gift-wrapped: comedy gold, the frankly incensed and mirthOpens in new window ]
His doubts about the show had long dissolved. “I knew by the audience reaction – and my own reaction to the scripts – that it was great. Even before it aired I went to Arthur and Graham’s flat and watched all six episodes back to back.
“I couldn’t believe how good it was and that I was part of it, but even then I was thinking, ‘No one is going to see this.’ I couldn’t see how a British audience would go for it. Also, being brought up in Monaghan, you don’t think anything good is ever going to happen to you.”
Father Ted reminds O’Hanlon of Fawlty Towers and Blackadder, which also star “someone who clearly thinks their talents have not been recognised, surrounded by fools. In terms of the relationship between Ted and Dougal, you’d definitely think of Basil Fawlty and Manuel, Blackadder and Baldrick. I was hugely influenced by Stan Laurel as a stand-up, never mind as an actor, always undermining the pompous person who supposedly knows better.”
The Irish media was initially hostile, with accusations of Paddywackery. “The generation that I and the writers were part of, we had confidence. We weren’t carrying that baggage. We felt we could play with those stereotypes. The first series was a sleeper. By the second series everyone was on board. The third series went through the roof – not just audience figures but the cultural impact.”
I ask him to describe the key players.
“Arthur is so funny, very droll. I think he’s really shy. His conversation is very anecdote-based. He is an absolute trove of great stories. My picture of Arthur is he’s not quite Nosferatu but in an attic room watching multiple TV screens. He is an absolute authority on TV. I just love Arthur. We have a lot in common, a love of comedy, football, music.
“Graham has just this phenomenal energy, incredible attention to detail, obsessed with comedy, a breadth of knowledge of TV comedy, an endless store of references, always very certain about what was right – and he usually was.
“Dermot was a lovely guy, generous. Maybe not unlike Fr Ted, he felt his talents were underappreciated. His mind was always racing in a hundred different directions, always trying to make up for lost time, frustrated by how he was treated by RTÉ. He was so thrilled to be working on British TV; he was an Anglophile.
“He was easily distracted, which could be frustrating to work with – he wasn’t always on top of his lines – but we got on great. We both felt like outsiders in the world of TV acting. I used to love when he popped up in the audience as Fr Trendy on The Live Mike, and his columns in the Sunday Tribune.
“I admired his doggedness. It was so rewarding that he got this role that he absolutely nailed. He dreamed big. He could be irrepressible. I loved him in his quieter moments. I felt I knew a realer Dermot, a person with normal insecurities.”
Pauline McLynn, as Mrs Doyle, “was great, coming from very much an acting background, great fun, the life and soul of the rehearsal room, also larger than life.
“We wouldn’t have watched much TV growing up. It was considered a bad influence, so it was rationed, but we always sat down as a family to watch Hall’s Pictorial Weekly. Frank Kelly” – who had been one of its stars – “was my earliest exposure to comedy. He was a slightly intimidating figure at first.
“Like a lot of comedy actors, he wanted to be taken seriously as a stage and screen actor. He was well built, walked with his chest out, but he was a lovely guy. He felt a little bit isolated, I think. His character wasn’t always integral to the plots, so he felt a bit frustrated.”
O’Hanlon, the son of a former Fianna Fáil minister, comes from a conservative, rural Catholic background, but the irreverence didn’t bother him.
“I was delighted to be part of a show that was satirising the church, which I felt was really ripe for satire. Gentle satire can be incredibly effective, not confrontational, like a light drizzle getting under your skin. It is certainly one of the reasons it became so popular in Ireland. We are always lampooning the priest figure.
“My family would definitely have had misgivings, but by the third series they were coming to recordings. It was fun. It captured a unique Irish comic sensibility but also channelled American and British comedy, a very sophisticated comedy product. It was verbal, it was visual, it was clever, it was slapstick. It’s not even about priests, it’s about men – about anything but religion.”
“When I did my first play in London, See You Next Tuesday, Prince Charles and Camilla came along. He told me he loved Father Ted – and Camilla corroborated that. In the same week Roger Moore and Michael Caine came. They had a monthly supper club called See You Next Tuesday, by coincidence.”
O’Hanlon began his career in Mr Trellis, a comedy trio with Kevin Gildea and Barry Murphy. They once supported The Joshua Trio, the U2 spoof band Mathews played in with Paul Woodfull, at Whelan’s in Dublin. “It was really funny, but I don’t think I realised Arthur was the drummer; he can be quite reserved.”
Woodfull played at O’Hanlon’s wedding in his various guises, including Ding Dong Denny O’Reilly and the Hairy Bowsies (which also featured Rooney).
O’Hanlon got married on December 30th, 1995, between the second series’ location shoots and studio recordings. On the morning of his wedding he got a very short haircut, which caused a huge continuity problem. A wig had to be commissioned at great expense, which he wore for five episodes, until his hair grew.
“That wig had its own career. It went on to The Fast Show. Paul Whitehouse wore it in the ‘Suits you, Sir’ sketches. It’s probably in Bridgerton now.”
I first met Mathews and Linehan in October 1994, at the launch, in a posh French restaurant in London, of their debut sitcom, Paris, which starred Alexei Sayle as a talentless French artist. (Linehan provoked the haughty waiters by deliberately mispronouncing dishes on the menu.)
Mathews, then 35, and Linehan, 10 years his junior, had only recently moved from Dublin to London, but they had already established themselves, scripting Sayle’s comedy sketch show as well as writing for Griff Rhys Jones, who became a patron, renting them his flat in Kilburn cheaply.
For all its madness and flights of fancy, Father Ted was rooted in realistic elements and recognisably Irish traits and traditions that made it believable and lovable. But from the outset the writers tended to downplay the extent to which the show subtly satirised the Catholic Church as well as other odd aspects of Irish life.
Mathews had previous. A graphic designer, he had been art director of Hot Press magazine, where he met Linehan, a witty, acerbic music and film critic. Mathews had created a spoof religious magazine, Majority Ethos, which he claimed had been snapped up from church porches and praised by bishops. “It was a cat thrown into Battersea dogs home for a laugh,” he said.
Father Ted’s launch the following April was at the Irish Club on Eaton Square, an elite address in Belgravia that perhaps subconsciously flagged the quality of the series.
It was immediately obvious that Channel 4 had a hit. It had already commissioned a second series. The scripts sparkled with one-liners and absurd but engaging plots. Morgan and O’Hanlon, hardened veteran and brilliant newcomer, made the perfect double act. Kelly managed to make Fr Jack, an alarmingly hideous caricature of the whiskey priest, lovable, while McLynn often stole the show as Mrs Doyle, with her gift for physical comedy.
But part of the show’s genius was its supporting cast, which drew on generations of Irish acting and comic talent: Graham Norton as the insufferably enthusiastic “youth” priest Fr Noel Furlong; Michael Redmond as the gloomy Fr Stone; Jim Norton as the irascible Bishop Brennan; and Tommy Tiernan as the suicidal Fr Kevin.
Mathews and Linehan married a sophisticated comic sensibility rooted in an encyclopedic knowledge and appreciation of Seinfeld, The Simpsons, Fawlty Towers, Steptoe and Son, and The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin with an unerring eye and ear for Irish eccentricities, which made the show authentic to a home audience without alienating an international one.
Take our obsession with the weather. “God, it’s lovely out,” Dougal says at the window as a typhoon rages. Or the priests’ variety show – “the holy shows, as they’re known colloquially” Mathews said. But Father Ted is “not an ethnic show. There’s no Irish thing in it that excludes people.”
The series evolved from Irish Lives, a mockumentary about a priest tracking down his old seminary pals that the pair had submitted to the prominent production company Hat Trick. Geoffrey Perkins – “the classic Oxbridge, slightly posh producer,” as Mathews puts it – whose credits included The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, saw the potential for a sitcom; his unerring instincts were invaluable.
It is all but forgotten now, but Father Ted – which was called Father Ted Crilly until, at the last minute, a friend of Linehan’s suggested dropping the surname – was once anathema to many Irish viewers, particularly among the diaspora, which tended to be more religious and more sensitive to perceived anti-Irish mockery. Ireland was changing. By the time the second series of Father Ted aired, in March 1996, Ireland had voted to legalise divorce.
The Catholic Church had been beset by scandal. In 1992 The Irish Times had revealed that Bishop Eamonn Casey had fathered a child, a plot line that Father Ted lifted for Bishop Brennan. Casey had also misappropriated diocesan funds – echoed in Fr Ted’s refrain that his ill-gotten gains were “just resting in my account”. In 1994 the paedophile priest Brendan Smyth was convicted of child sexual abuse; paedophilia would be too dark for a sitcom, of course, but Fr Jack is seen in flashback lusting after schoolgirls.
Nevertheless, the letters pages of the Irish Post in London, where I then worked, were exercised more by Father Ted’s gentle send-up of the church than by the real-life priests whom the criminal-justice system sent down.
Its characters are caricatures, cleverly subverting stereotypes, not reinforcing them. Fr Jack gets drunk on Toilet Duck and Castrol GTX, not just whiskey. British and American sitcoms are full of idiotic characters, but some Irish viewers in Britain, subject to decades of “thick Paddy” abuse, saw in Father Ted the perpetuation of anti-Irish stereotypes: drunken, priest-ridden, stupid.
Linehan told me at the launch of the second series, “I can understand people who are a bit oversensitive being offended by our treatment of the Catholic Church even though our treatment of it is quite gentle. My parents are the most Catholic people in the world, and they like it.
“But the anti-Irish thing confuses me. It’s a caricature of a stereotype. If you exaggerate something until it’s just bizarre, hopefully people won’t take it seriously. What they say about Father Ted, the drunks and the violence, you can say about The Young Ones, about Bottom. You’ve always got the stupid guy, the belligerent guy. It’s the Laurel-and-Hardy thing, the idiot who knows nothing and the idiot who knows everything.
By the third series Father Ted was unassailable, armour-plated with awards and astronomical viewing figures. RTÉ had belatedly bought the rights, so it was as big at home as it was in Britain.
The writers had decided, however, that the third series would be the last. As Linehan noted in Tough Crowd: How I Made and Lost a Career in Comedy, “the fact that all the characters bar Ted were rather extreme caricatures was beginning to make it more and more difficult to come up with new things for them to say. You can only play the out-of-character card once per series.”
Fate would ensure that the show would come to a natural if tragic end. The final episode, Going to America, was recorded on February 27th, 1998, at London Studios, next to the National Theatre. It begins with Fr Kevin threatening to jump from a ledge at an It’s Great Being a Priest! conference until Fr Ted manages to talk him down. During rehearsals, Morgan had raised a laugh by ad-libbing, “Jump, you bollocks.”
I was a supporting actor in the scene, playing a priest alongside my fellow journalists Frs Liam Mackey, Liam Fay and Ken Sweeney – old friends of the writers from Hot Press – and Fr Brian Eno.
The episode ends with Fr Kevin – having been cheered up by Ted playing the theme song from Shaft, then made miserable again by a bus driver playing Exit Music (For a Film), by Radiohead – back on the window ledge. Ted, his hopes of a transfer to Beverly Hills parish thwarted, joins him.
Linehan told me at the wrap party of his concern that the series had ended on too dark a note. Morgan was ebullient, having escaped the island whose broadcasters were too conservative for his ambition.
Less than 24 hours later Morgan died of a heart attack, aged just 45. He would win a posthumous Bafta for best comedy performance. The final scene was replaced by a montage of highlights.
Morgan, a fan of Monty Python and Not the Nine O’Clock News, had told me in 1992, “That’s one thing I envy the Brits: their tradition of comedy. One of the great saving graces of a postcolonial power is they always reserved the right to slag themselves to death. That comes from running the show for centuries. I wonder, though, why it is we’re still suspicious of satire in Ireland. Perhaps it’s national insecurity.”
He likened himself to Danny, the tunnel king in The Great Escape played by Charles Bronson, every TV proposal a tunnel he was digging to break out of Ireland. In the end he smuggled himself out disguised as a priest.
IN 2018 LINEHAN announced Pope Ted: The Father Ted Musical, written with Mathews, with music by Neil Hannon. “It’s the real final episode of Father Ted.”
Woodfull had also written songs, Risteárd Cooper played Ted, and there were lots of rehearsals and read-throughs. “The songs were great,” Mathews tells me, “the best thing about it. There’s an Over the Rainbow-type epic, which is just fantastic. And then all hell broke out. It’s tragic. Graham was into the whole trans thing, from a feminist point of view he would say, and there were a lot of cancellations.
“Terry Gilliam had just had one of his shows cancelled, and Hat Trick thought we won’t be able to get financial backing with Graham attached – which was crazy, as he’d written most of it. They offered him money to step away, and he decided not to, which was fair enough. It was bizarre, but that was the cancel-culture zeitgeist.
“I think if Graham hadn’t been so furious there might have been some hope for it. He blames me for not backing him. I’m perfectly happy for him to say whatever he wants, free speech or whatever. I never criticised him, but he just got so angry.”
Woodfull recalls the origins of Father Ted in long Hot Press production weekends that were made for mischief. “Fr Ted was a character Arthur dreamed up and would perform for us in the office. Arthur’s version was a camp priest. We wouldn’t have been aware that so many priests were gay, so it was a great observation on his part.”
Mackey says of Mathews, “I always remember Declan Lynch saying, ‘You have to hire this guy. He’s one of the funniest people I ever met.’ Arthur used to rally the troops in the wee hours playing this pious priest, steepling his fingers, giving a homily with an invisible broken microphone, his voice fading in and out. It was genuinely hilarious.”
Woodfull and Mathews formed The Joshua Trio with Woodfull’s brother Kieran, who played bass guitar. “I would claim that Bono had appeared to me in a dream and wanted me to spread their music to a wider audience,” Woodfull says.
Mathews recalls, “One of my favourite moments was the St Patrick’s Day parade in Cork on the back of a trailer. We turned the corner and the Irish Army were there, and Paul just said, in his Bono Jesus character’s voice, ‘Throw down your weapons!’ Getting a donkey on stage at the Baggot Inn was another famous incident.”
Woodfull continues, “Arthur, myself and Graham put a comedy sketch group together called The Fun Bunch. Fr Ted first appeared on stage in a comedy night at the Project Arts theatre. After that Arthur’s Fr Ted would come out during the set of my other musical comedy act, Tony St James and the Las Vegas Sound, and give a sermon.
“He used to talk about his concern for a priest colleague on the missions named Dougal McGuire, who had been voted most unpopular priest in Africa for two years running and was spending Christmas up a tree in the grounds of the Bob Geldof Centre, where he worked.
“Fr Ted later featured in a series we used to do called The Starship Róisín for the Ian Dempsey show on RTÉ radio in the late 1980s. It was basically an Irish Star Trek.”
MATHEWS LIVES IN in south Dublin with his partner, the literary agent Faith O’Grady, and their daughter. He is guarded initially, but as he warms up he laughs readily.
Linehan wanted Mathews to play the part of Fr Ted on TV, but Mathews says he never considered it. “It would have been too much pressure. I knew Dermot would be perfect. Ted is a fully rounded character, very common in sitcoms, someone with aspirations beyond their abilities, like Reginald Perrin, wanting to escape to a better life but completely stuck, which makes it poignant.”
What are his standout memories?
“I remember being in a pub in Clare, and Dermot sent out for pizzas from 20 miles away. He was very generous. I remember the star names – Richard Wilson and Clare Grogan. I’ll tell you who’s in it, though: this guy I’m obsessed by, Vernon Dobtcheff, one of the Nazi priests. I saw him in Mary, Queen of Scots the other day. I started watching The Saint and The Avengers and ticking off all the actors I’d worked with who’d been in them. That was a thrill, part of TV history.”
I bought into all that stuff up until my 20s, but I was really damaged by it. I always say if I had watched internet porn around the clock it would have been less damaging
— Arthur Mathews
Mathews loves comics. He and his friend Mick Nugent, now head of Atheist Ireland, created Gak Bag, which was heavily influenced by Viz. Every Christmas he created a spoof provincial newspaper, the Border Fascist, for Hot Press. “One of my favourite books was Bruce McCall’s Zany Afternoons.” The Canadian illustrator was a huge influence, he says.
Mathews insists that Father Ted’s approach to the Catholic Church was closer to Monty Python than to Dave Allen. “He was angry, but Python just found big pointy hats funny.”
What was his attitude?
“I bought into all that stuff up until my 20s, but I was really damaged by it, all the supernatural stuff. I remember I had a big fear of the end of the world and demonic possession at the age of eight or nine. I always say if I had watched internet porn around the clock it would have been less damaging.
“I found it really grim, dark and superstitious, from the same place as vampires or ghosts – scary stuff. I did believe in Catholicism. My father was quite religious. I just thought about it too much. It was very bad for my mental health.”
How did that feed into Father Ted?
“Dougal doesn’t believe. Ted would like to believe, but he sees it as a career. The main thing is never to analyse it. You’d realise it doesn’t make any sense. We didn’t set out to undermine the church. It coincided with revelations about all the bad things priests had done. There’s a danger of tarring them all with the one brush. It’s weird how their power is gone and they’re now derided. I never thought I’d see that day.”
Two of Mathews’s uncles were priests. “I was quite fond of my Uncle Tom especially. He was a very good man. Uncle Paddy died in 1989. I don’t know what he would have made of it. I found myself once watching Prince live in concert with him, Prince singing Sexy Motherf**ker. There was a pause, and my uncle, very austere, goes, “What the hell would be going on in his head?” Brilliantly surreal. All that stuff would go into Ted.
“Tom once said my mother’s anniversary Mass for us in his car. I was flying to London. He was flying from Birmingham, so he said, ‘I’ll hire a car in Dublin Airport and we’ll say it in the car.’ My sister Ria and I were in the back, he was in the front, all these air hostesses passing by. It was fantastic. He said a little homily about my mother, looking at us in the mirror like a taxi driver.”
Another inspiration was Liam Fay’s Beyond Belief, “a great book about mad Catholics, very funny. There was a thing in that about seeing an image of Jesus in a skirting board. I’m sure that’s where the idea comes from where they kick the bishop.”
Mathews remembers the comedian Kevin McAleer, whom he loves, turning down a role, and Dave Allen asking for so much money to be in the Christmas episode that it was just another way of saying no. Brendan O’Carroll did a great audition for the role of Pat Mustard, the milkman.
“You have to get the cast right. Writers won’t agree, but I think you are better off with a really good cast and an imperfect script rather than a really good script and an imperfect cast.”
How did the collaboration with Linehan work?
“I’d just sit down and write away. Even if it’s not very good, everything gets rewritten anyway. Graham would be more angsty, walk around and be reluctant sometimes to sit down and get the work done, but then he did. He wrote every episode of The IT Crowd on his own, and it’s great.
“We had a word processor. We would do a list of 10 points. One of us would sit down and type away; the other would ponder, walk around, say ‘How about this?’ The best ones take less work. My favourite is probably Entertaining Father Stone,” he says, referring to the episode in which an unbearably dull priest arrives for his yearly visit. “It’s very simple, and the pace is quite slow – not as frantic – which is untypical. I like the awkwardness of a conversation with someone who is impossible to talk to.”
What was his favourite line? “I was with Paul Woodfull, watching archive footage of a very shaky-looking Adolf Hitler in 1945, about to send out 15-year-old boys to defend Berlin. Paul remarked, ‘It’s funny how you get more right-wing as you get older.’ We put this into the show referring to an old Nazi priest.”
“I think Father Ted was primarily just good fun,” Liam Mackey says. “To make larger claims for it is to play down what was its great strength. It was brilliantly funny. All those catchphrases and memes it generated are the sign of something really good. It was timeless, outside its time, not of its time.
“There is a tendency to see it as a satire of the oppressive church, but it was played for laughs. The slapstick, the wordplay, the casting was perfect. It’s funny and warm-hearted. It has a cartoonish quality which means it never fades. It has this appeal to every generation.”
Father Ted is free to stream on RTÉ Player and channel4.com
