Drink! Feck! Arse!: Behind the scenes of Father Ted on its 30th anniversary
Father Ted stars Frank Kelly and Dermot Morgan.
A few years ago, Lissa Evans was invited to London’s Stoke Newington Literary Festival to interview Ardal O’Hanlon about a novel he had just published. The two are friends since their days working on Father Ted – Evans as a producer, O’Hanlon as Father Dougal.
Unfortunately, O’Hanlon’s flight from Dublin was cancelled at the last minute. To plug the gap in the festival’s schedule, Evans went on stage and fielded questions from the audience about her memories of working on Father Ted. The premise was simple: “Suggest an episode and I’ll tell you everything I remember about it.” She’d nothing prepared, but an hour later she was still talking. It came easy. The memories were as fresh as though the filming was yesterday.
As well as being a producer, Evans considers herself a superfan of the show, so writing about “the surreal joys of producing Father Ted” has lent itself naturally to a book. First broadcast on Channel 4 in April 1995, the sitcom about three misfit priests and their housekeeper living on an island off the west of Ireland, is still finding new audiences 30 years later.
“The brilliance of the writing, the perfection of the jokes drew me in,” says Evans, an English BAFTA-winning producer and writer. “As a comedy producer, you're always looking for great scripts. I had never read such a good or funny script. I loved it from the first moment. It was so original and beautifully written. It was off the wall, but it was off the wall with precision. That made it unique in my eyes.
“The show is about a dysfunctional family. We’ve nearly all got one of those. People loved the characters. The fact it was set in Ireland and that it’s steeped in Catholicism are added bonuses, extra jokes in what is already a brilliant set of characters. The basic premise, according to [creators] Graham Linehan or Arthur Mathews, was the question, ‘What do priests do during the week when they’re not in church?’ So there was fascination from English audiences, who are discovering a whole new world, but there was also this embrace of this weird family.”
Evans, who has published a dozen novels and children’s books, has written a hugely enjoyable memoir, diving back into the madcap world of Father Ted, and the difficulties of filming in the west of Ireland in the depths of winter in the 1990s. She mentions finding a lift in Co Clare to film one scene proved particularly tricky, not to mention how to manage sheep every time they’re mentioned in the script.
Dermot Morgan, who played the title character Father Ted, died in 1998, aged only 45 the day after filming finished for the final episode. He inevitably looms large in the book, which is dedicated to him and Frank Kelly, who played Father Jack, who also passed away in 2016. Morgan rarely sat still on set – his mind was always buzzing with future plans. During live recordings, he joked and fooled around with the audience like a “warm-up act”.
For a scene between Father Ted and his “boss”, Bishop Brennan, who bursts into Ted’s bedroom threatening him violently, the studio director, Andy De Emmony, spoke to both actors separately before filming. To Morgan, he said: “Whatever you do, don’t let Jim [Norton, aka Bishop Brennan] back you up against the wall,” and to Norton, he said, “You have got to back Dermot up against the wall.” The ruse created real tension on camera.
“Dermot was amazing,” says Evans. “Ted evolved into a three-dimensional character. It’s a mad comedy, but Ted is real – Ted suffers. He has ambitions. He knows he’s ruined his own life. Dermot had a subtle character to play. He also had about four-fifths of the lines, including all the exposition, all the boring stuff, if you like, whereas all Ardal had were punch lines, which he did with utter perfection. The same with Jack and Mrs Doyle. Ted was the engine which ran the whole show. Obviously that responsibility weighed on him. He was a man who didn't find it particularly easy to learn lines or to focus. That was a lot of responsibility – he knew the show rested on his shoulders.”
Eoin McLove’s character, a singer-songwriter played by Patrick McDonnell, was one of Evans’ favourite secondary characters; along with Graham Norton’s, a stand-up comedian she’d never heard of before he delivered such an impressive audition it left her weeping; and Joe Rooney, as the delinquent priest Father Damo who leads Dougal astray.
“Patrick McDonnell’s character Eoin McLove – who isn’t in any way Daniel O’Donnell, by the way – was great because he wasn’t like anyone else,” says Evans. “His performance was unique and fitted this extraordinary man-boy who turns out not to have any mickey at the end. He’s still shouted at in the street – ‘You’ve got no mickey!’ – which must be a mixed blessing.”
Neil Hannon, the Divine Comedy’s frontman, provided the theme tune and lots of original music for the show. Sometimes he was too good at his job. When Evans reviewed his tune, ‘My Lovely Mayo Mammy’ – a song for Eoin McLove’s TV show – she found it rather moody and lyrical. It was a proper melancholic pop song. She emailed him back: “Dear Neil, I’m afraid the music for ‘My Lovely Mayo Mammy’ is just too good; can you compose something that sounded a bit more crappy?” He duly sent back something more crappy.
- Picnic on Craggy Island: The Surreal Joys of Producing Father Ted by Lissa Evans is published by Doubleday
There are many iconic scenes from Father Ted. One particular fan favourite is the sequence when several priests get lost in a knicker department. It’s a painfully funny sketch, which was filmed over the course of a single night as part of A Christmassy Ted, a bonus episode first broadcast in December 1996.
The actors and production crew spent no actual time in the location, the lingerie section of Dunnes Stores, Ennis, Co Clare, once it was scouted, until the night of filming. There was no rehearsal. The director, Declan Lowney, and his cameraman, Eugene O’Connor, planned each scene on the fly. The only script change was a suggestion the priest with the boring voice could glide into shot while seated on a camera trolley for his scene.
It was a rare few hours of calm for the producer, Lissa Evans, who could enjoy watching the actors deliver those memorable lines, as the sweating priests weaved their way around a bevy of scantily clad, pouting mannequins (brought over especially from England by the art department), with glorious seriousness: “I’ve been in this damned lingerie section so long.”
Evans got back to their hotel, the Falls in Ennistymon, sometime after breakfast. She went to bed straight away, got up again in the afternoon, ate something and played a bit of Scrabble with Ardal O’Hanlon, and then went back to bed again. Most of the rest of the crew hit the bar on getting back to the hotel and stayed there all day and all evening before getting up the following morning at 6.30am for another day’s madness on set.
