Channel 4
COMFORT CLASSIC
Father Ted
F
ather Ted is one of TV’s greatest British sitcoms – up there with other giants of the genre such as Fawlty Towers, Gavin and Stacey and The Thick of It. It is plain loopy – daft, surreal, edgy in its debunking of the Church and blessed by four timeless characters. This quartet were delivered to the small screen fully realised in the first episode shown on Channel 4 in 1995: the utterly gormless Father Dougal McGuire; the debauched Father Jack Hackett; the obsequious housekeeper from hell (sort of), Mrs Doyle; and the eponymous Father Ted Crilly, vain and hapless. Ahead of its time, Father Ted is no cosy, suburban sitcom poking gentle fun at well-meaning vicars fond of a
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‘Fathers… finish your breakfast and come outside for your daily punishment.’ Steve Clarke applauds a comic gem pre-dinner nip of sherry. Father Jack is a sex-obsessed, uber-sozzled priest, an alcoholic sometimes in the full grip of delirium tremens. He rarely says anything apart from: “Drink! Feck! Arse! Girls!” There is a lot of the anarchy of The Young Ones in Graham Linehan and Arthur Mathews’ comic masterpiece. The show’s reckless attitude to the
Catholic Church would have been unthinkable in the wake of the child abuse scandals that have rocked the institution in recent years. Slapstick is often a vital ingredient in comedy. In Father Ted, made by comedy powerhouse Hat Trick, slapstick is given a surreal edge in, say, the episode (the writers’ favourite) in which Ted kicks the pompous and tyrannical Bishop Brennan in the arse. Or as the insanely clumsy Mrs Doyle again falls out of a window or lurches into a door, the contents of her tea trolley scattering across the cluttered and moth-eaten sitting room. The set itself is a joy, shabbier even than its occupants. All great sitcoms are based on characters that jump out of the screen. Father Crilly, scheming, always on the
