Is it fair to criticise a nonfiction book for what it doesn’t include? Most would argue that it isn’t unless the omissions materially alter the subject being tackled. And this is where Lissa Evans’s thoroughly enjoyable, if unavoidably ephemeral, jeu d’esprit about her role in the creation of the second and third seasons of Graham Linehan and Arthur Mathews’s classic sitcom Father Ted runs into existential difficulty. There is a fine line between unfair hindsight and the inarguable necessity of being able to contextualise a controversy that has arisen since—and Evans’s book, accomplished and readable though it is, only covers a portion of the story.
During its initial broadcast on Channel 4 between 1995 and 1998, Father Ted swiftly established itself as one of the decade’s strongest sitcoms, winning two Baftas for best comedy. Dermot Morgan (pictured) also deservedly took home a Bafta for his magisterial performance as the eponymous Ted, the funniest straight man since Eric Morecambe. Thirty years after it first blessed our screens, the show has only grown in stature. Not only was it voted the second-greatest sitcom of all time (after, inevitably, Fawlty Towers) in a Radio Times poll in 2019, but it is now quite clear that it’s the finest example of television comedy between Blackadder in the 1980s and Peep Show in the 2000s. It probably transcends both of those seminal sitcoms, too.
The key to its appeal is the beautiful simplicity of the “sit” and the peerlessly executed brilliance of the “com”. The fortysomething Father Ted Crilly is a charming and essentially decent man, albeit with a short fuse and all-too-human vices. He has been exiled onto the godforsaken Craggy Island off the coast of Ireland after some Las Vegas-based financial impropriety. (“That money was only resting in my account!”) Once ensconced in the island’s parochial house, he finds himself marooned with the indomitably stupid but cheery Father Dougal, the scabrous Father Jack and the Beckettian housekeeper Mrs Doyle, who perpetually offers the priests in her care endless cups of tea and belligerently refuses to take no for an answer.
In the course of the show’s 25 episodes, a pattern swiftly forms. Ted will usually become involved in some misdemeanour or not-so-bright wheeze, sometimes at the behest of his terrifying superior, Bishop Brennan. He will be aided and abetted (usually the latter) by Dougal, while Jack delivers his inimitable catchphrases—“Arse! Drink! Girls! Feck!”—from his filthy, nicotine- and alcohol-soaked corner of the parochial house. Occasionally, Ted will do his best to escape the grim situation that he finds himself in, and at the beginning of the third season he has indeed left Craggy Island for the more simpatico environs of a well-heeled Dublin parish—until the usual temptation to fiddle the church accounts rears its head and he is once again banished back to the old familiar hell.
The show has aged far better than its contemporaries by dint of determinedly ignoring virtually all aspects of real life. (A nod to the Eamonn Casey scandal in the first season’s episode “The Passion of Saint Tibulus”, featuring another bishop who has conceived a child with his mistress, is one of the very few moments in the show that could be described as topical satire.) Yet, although the surrealism and carefully constructed gags can aptly be described as genius, Linehan and Mathews’s most impressive feat is leavening both the on-screen zaniness and wildly eccentric supporting characters with the thoroughly likeable figure of Ted and the oddly comforting, quasi-family dynamic of the parochial house. Watching the show on Friday nights in my decidedly less-than-cosy school boarding house in the mid-1990s, I would have swapped my life for Ted’s in an instant.
Father Ted ended with Morgan’s tragically young death from a heart attack at 45, though Linehan and Mathews had intended for the third season to be the last anyhow. It concludes with the bittersweet episode “Going to America”, in which Ted is offered the chance to escape Craggy Island forever by moving to a West Coast parish, only to realise at the last minute that it will not be a sun-kissed Californian idyll but a hellhole of gun violence and gang warfare. Fleeing his potentially fatal destiny, Ted makes reluctant peace with the fact that he, like so many other sitcom protagonists, will be stuck with his Sisyphean fate forever, doomed to be the relatively sane one in a world of misfits and madmen.
Ted makes reluctant peace with the fact that he will be stuck with his Sisyphean fate forever
Evans joined Father Ted after its successful first season, which was produced by the much-missed doyen of intelligent British comedy, Geoffrey Perkins. When Perkins moved to the BBC as its head of comedy, Evans, who had previously worked as a radio producer, took over his position, which she describes as an awesome responsibility: “I was walking in a giant’s footsteps.” She had worked at Perkins’s company, Hat Trick Productions, and was an unabashed fan of the show from its inception. She writes, “I felt weirdly proprietorial about the forthcoming series, even though I had no role whatsoever in its production.”
Although she produced 19 of its 25 episodes, Evans would be the first to acknowledge that she had no direct artistic role in the show’s success. Nevertheless, her level-headedness and endlessly capable organisational skills meant that Linehan and Mathews’s wilder flights of fancy could be brought onto the screen not only intact—but enhanced. Many of the most entertaining anecdotes in Picnic on Craggy Island are those that concern the behind-the-scenes minutiae that had to be attended to so that the jokes could land so spectacularly.
In the third season’s opener, “Are You Right There, Father Ted”, for instance, the episode’s first half ends with perhaps the show’s finest ever sight gag—which, by default, makes it one of the greatest in television history—in which Ted, having offended Craggy Island’s Chinese community with his inadvertent racism, summons them to the parochial house to make amends. He is distracted by a perfectly formed patch of black dirt on the window and starts waving his arms angrily, an expression that, from the outraged Chinese visitors’ perspective, makes it look as if the gesticulating priest is nothing less than a frothing fascist.
Today, the effect would probably be created with computer effects and so sidestep the fun. Evans recounts how “in the traditional way of making members of the cast feel as physically uncomfortable as possible, Dermot’s head was held in a clamp when we filmed the Hitler speech scene, to make sure that his upper lip remained in exactly the same place in relation to the ‘moustache’ throughout.” It worked—beautifully. The giddy guffaws of the studio audience in every episode are not canned laughter but real, near-hysterical mirth. Evans reveals that on some occasions, they had to take several seconds of uproar out in the edit, as otherwise the episodes would have overrun.
This is an affectionate, continually interesting book, concise at fewer than 150 pages and perhaps the better for it. It is unashamedly a personal account, written with Evans’s usual gift for humour and observation, and arose from her having treated an audience at the Stoke Newington Literary Festival to impromptu reminiscences after her planned interview with the actor Ardal O’Hanlon, who played Dougal, was cancelled due to his unavailability.
However, Father Ted has had a strange and not altogether happy afterlife, which Evans makes no mention of whatsoever. Initially, the great love that many held for the show gave rise to an annual celebration, “Ted Fest”, in which its biggest fans assembled at filming locations, dressed up as its characters and exchanged catchphrases: all good fun, and it continues to this day. Mathews had his greatest post-Ted successes with the similarly surreal Matt Berry vehicle Toast of London and the popular Roy Keane musical I, Keano, while Linehan went on to write everything from The IT Crowd to the television version of Count Arthur Strong. Linehan continually suggested that he wanted to adapt Father Ted into a musical. But he also acknowledged the difficulty of recruiting Mathews, the composer and Divine Comedy frontman Neil Hannon to write the music and the right actors to replace the apparently irreplaceable Morgan, as well as Frank Kelly, who played Father Jack and died in 2016.
Eventually, after considerable wooing by Linehan, Mathews and Hannon were on board. The musical was formally announced in 2018 and was intended—with what now seems prescient topicality—to revolve around Ted becoming the Pope. Linehan called it “the real final episode of Father Ted”, and expectations were high for a lengthy West End run. Unfortunately, the show’s gestation coincided with Linehan’s newer and rather less welcome work as a particularly vocal anti-trans campaigner. He was supposedly offered £200,000 by one of the producers to step away and take his name off the musical, for fear of protests and boycotts if he continued to be involved. After he refused, its cancellation became inevitable.
The musical was formally announced in 2018 and was intended to revolve around Ted becoming the Pope
Since then, Linehan—who wrote incisively about Father Ted in his own 2023 memoir, Tough Crowd—has publicly bemoaned what he regards as the corporate cowardice and cancel culture that were responsible for the musical’s mothballing. Mathews and Hannon have remained largely silent. When I interviewed the latter in 2022, he made it politely clear that it was not a subject he wished to discuss. It remains uncertain whether it would be possible, or viable, for a Ted musical ever to appear in any form, given that the rights presumably belong to Linehan, Mathews, Hannon and anyone else who had developed the show.
None of this, understandably, makes it into Picnic on Craggy Island, nor does Evans say anything about Linehan other than praise him for his comic genius and willingness to adapt his and Mathews’s flights of fancy when required to by both the production schedules and the basic laws of physics. If this book is regarded as a personal memoir of a happy and fecund time in its author’s professional career, then it succeeds admirably and will be another welcome addition to Father Ted lore for the show’s many admirers.
Yet it is frustrating that Evans has not taken this opportunity to say something about the programme’s afterlife. As Linehan prepares to defend harassment charges in the UK (while also saying that he intends to work in the more amiable surroundings of the United States, unlike his show’s protagonist), it would have been useful to get an idea of where Evans stood on these vexed matters. Her silence leaves a feeling of dissatisfaction as the reader concludes this otherwise thoroughly affectionate and fair-minded account of a happy, bygone era.
