The Irish Are Coming. Ryan Tubridy
care that the Church was being mocked; not a question was raised about it. Twenty years earlier it simply wouldn’t have been countenanced, but attitudes to the Catholic Church had changed. First of all there were the stories about priests who had secretly had children, then it moved into deeper and more terrible waters with the news that some priests had been abusing children, so I suspect the powers that be felt they weren’t in a strong position to criticize. Unfettered by protest, one of the funniest sitcoms of the twentieth century came on screen to wide praise and much applause. Essentially, Father Ted did for the priesthood what Fawlty Towers did for the hotel business – made us not take it too seriously.
It all started when Irish writers Graham Linehan and Arthur Mathews got together to brainstorm some ideas for comic sketches and characters. Both had form: between them, they had worked on Alas Smith and Jones and The Fast Show as well as writing material for Alexei Sayle and Harry Enfield. They came up with the idea for a comic documentary with each episode focusing on a particular Irish ‘type’ and the first episode featured a scheming but loveable goon called Father Ted. They pitched it to Hat Trick Productions and Channel 4 in the UK, and the response was that they didn’t want the mockumentary but they’d love to see a sitcom about Father Ted.
Off the boys went and dreamed up the idea for the show we all know and love. Three priests have been sent to Craggy Island in penance for past misdemeanours and they live there with their housekeeper, Mrs Doyle, who keeps trying to give them cups of tea and trays of sandwiches. The storylines tend to involve Father Ted getting himself into embarrassing scrapes then digging ever-deeper holes as he attempts to lie and cheat his way out of them. The script was good but it needed exactly the right cast to make it work. Fortunately, they already knew who they wanted in the lead role …
For Irish readers of my generation, 80s television comedy was defined and exemplified by one man: stand-up mimic and actor Dermot Morgan was a staple on RTÉ television. Our parents roared laughing at him throughout the decade of Thatcher and Haughey while just a few years later, nerdy students like myself sat by the radio to hear him on Scrap Saturday, Irish radio’s version of Britain’s Spitting Image (a show we could and did watch in Ireland too). Morgan had a way with voices and he hooked up with quality scriptwriters to sharpen the wit. The show poked fun at the great and the good to the point that it disappeared mysteriously one Saturday morning, never to be seen again. Morgan was gutted and called the decision to axe it ‘a shameless act of broadcasting cowardice and political subservience’. I was gutted too. It had mercilessly lampooned our political leaders and public figures in a way that’s very important in a democracy and nothing immediately stepped into the breach.
Morgan slogged long and hard on the comedy circuit in Ireland where one of his characters, Father Trendy, a ‘cool’ and ‘with it’ priest, remained a constant favourite. That’s why, when the producers of Father Ted called in 1994, he was more than ready for the challenge and stepped into the lead role with aplomb.
Father Dougal, the bumbling priest who is not overburdened with brains, was played by Ardal O’Hanlon, while the role of Father Jack, the potty-mouthed alcoholic, went to Frank Kelly. My favourite character, Mrs Doyle, was played by Pauline McLynn with such exceptional comic finesse that her catchphrases were soon in use nationwide.
‘Will you have a cup of tea?’
‘No thanks, Mrs Doyle.’
‘Ah, go on go on go on go on go on go on go on go on go on go on …’
‘I won’t have a cup right now.’
‘You will you will you will you will you will you will you will you will you will …’
She’s every Irish mother of a certain vintage, constantly bringing in trays full of sandwiches that no one is ever going to eat, and I love her.
Top actors and comics queued up to be part of the joke: Graham Norton played the high-camp Father Noel Furlong in three episodes and Ed Byrne played a teenager mocking Father Ted on a telephone chatline. The show had that buzz right from the start and everyone involved knew it was going to be big. The first series quickly acquired cult status when it was broadcast on Channel 4 and it is still pretty much shown on a loop on RTÉ 2. Awards followed: in 1998 Father Ted got a BAFTA for Best Comedy, Dermot Morgan got one for Best Actor and Pauline McLynn got Best Actress.
Two more series were filmed before Morgan announced that he would be leaving the show for fear of being typecast. One night after the final day’s filming on the final series, he and his partner, Fiona, were hosting a dinner party in London when he collapsed and died of a heart attack at the age of forty-five. He remains one of the more poignant ‘what-ifs’ in his contribution to stage and screen on these islands.
The show couldn’t go on without Morgan (although an American production company is filming a US remake with priests set on an island off the New England coast). Like Fawlty Towers, it would never have time for the jokes to grow tired so will always retain its cult status.
Father Ted is probably the purest fusion of Irish and British comedy. Commissioned by Channel 4, it had an all-Irish cast, spent much time filming in the beautiful County Clare and had Irish writers. We would have complained loudly if the British had written a sitcom about three corrupt, scheming, totally unreligious priests. In the same way as only gay people can call themselves queer and only black people are allowed to use the ‘n’ word, we are the only ones allowed to mock ourselves in general but priests in particular. And the comedy in Father Ted is as Irish as it gets: very funny, very clever and spiritually satirical, with its post-ironic political incorrectness.
DARA O BRIAIN: the most Irish of them all
Born 4 February 1972
This is the first time in my lifetime that Irish people are able to go: ‘What? You’re going to England? Sure, it’s full of terrorists. Come to Ireland. We’ve no terrorists at all. They’re all playwrights now.’
As eras go, the early 90s weren’t that bad. Bill Clinton brought rock and roll and blowjobs to the White House. Ireland elected a woman as president and qualified for its first-ever World Cup finals. Nirvana, Blur and The Cranberries burst on to the scene as U2 continued to reinvent and give them all a master class in stamina. As a nerdy student at University College Dublin I found myself moving in varied circles that took in politics, history and the bar. As I did so, I found myself brushing shoulders (mine narrow, his broad) with a most articulate and very amusing science type who emerged as a star of the debating circuit. Holding court in whatever lecture theatre he performed in, Dara O Briain was always going to end up in a job where his voice would be heard.
Brought up in Bray, County Wicklow, the O’Briains spoke Irish at home and Dara attended an Irish-speaking school in a Dublin suburb. At University College Dublin, he studied theoretical physics but, between lectures, his head was turned by the banter and repartee that dominated college debating societies. It wasn’t long before the motion for discussion became irrelevant as the lecture theatres filled to hear the mile-a-minute science student divert the discussion to suit his observations. Story-telling and quick-witted comebacks were the order of the day rather than stand-alone gags and it was in these student lecture halls that Dara honed his skills and saw the potential of a career in comedy.
The next step was to gain some exposure and earn a few quid on the national broadcaster. A stint on children’s television and as a panellist on a satirical panel show was complemented by constant gigging around the world with much time spent in Australia and at festivals like Edinburgh, where his shows were attracting some very important interest.
Most of the subjects in this book simply outgrew Ireland. For a country that prides itself on the ability to talk and talk and talk, sometimes it feels like going around in circles and, for some people, the circles become too small and so a toe is dipped into the Irish Sea. Dara’s career went as far as it could in Ireland and he couldn’t resist the temptation to look over the hedge at a bigger field: ‘You’re sitting next door to a country of 60 million people which has Christ knows how many