GALWAY, 9 a.m. yesterday morning a man, handcuffed to a Special Branch officer, makes his weary way up the courtroom steps. He stops suddenly, pulling the Branch man to a halt, and both stare at a suspicious looking vehicle parked on the street.

On the other side of the street, Graham Linehan and Arthur Mathews, the writers of TV comedy series Father Ted, are making a run for it they're being pursued by two sound recordists and all four look like they're in considerable distress. Nobody calls cut. This is life imitating sitcom.

Like most sitcoms, the plot is deceptively simple. Galway is hosting a "Father Ted Day" in a theatre across the road from the courthouse. One of the 45 people attending the Ted Day has arrived in a custom built Tedmobile and his van is decorated in large painted colours with popular expressions from the hit sitcom ("Arse", "Drink", "Feck", etc). This is what has caught the attention of the man and his Special Branch escort as they enter the courthouse.

(Minutes later an urgent message arrives in the theatre. The judge is none too pleased with the Tedmobile parked outside the court we believe the word "undignified" was used and the driver is asked to move it. Post haste.)

Meanwhile, a breathless Graham Linehan and Arthur Mathews, with the RTE sound recordists in tow, have arrived at a hostel around the corner from the theatre. They're supposed to be doing a live interview for Richard Crowley's morning programme but the sound people deemed the theatre foyer to be unsuitable we believe the word "acoustics" was used and with literally seconds left before they went on air, the team had to flee around the corner to the hostel. Post haste.

The interview begins but the surrealism hasn't ended yet. The owner of the hostel is standing behind the sound crew holding up a card bearing the name of his hostel and appears to be mouthing to Linehan and Mathews to name check his establishment on national radio. Then we flip straight into Fawlty Towers mode as the hostel man starts worrying aloud about "the Germans". It appears a group of Germans, staying at his hostel, are due down the stairs any moment and are scripted to land right in the middle of the interview party.

It's 9.10 am. in the morning all concerned got to bed at 5 a.m. and the only thing we can think of doing is striking a Father Dougal pose and saying "It's mad being in Galway, isn't it Ted?"

Linehan and Mathews look a tad upset by what transpired during the interview but there's no time to talk about it now they're due on stage at 9.30 a.m. for a Comedy Masterclass, no less. In recognition of the massive commercial and critical success of Ted (it is Channel 4's second most watched programme of all time, behind Brookside, and has won a clutch of BAFTA awards for Linehan and Mathews) the Galway Film Fleadh people have organised a series of events for today based on the programme, and while we're still giggling like school kids about the mad events of a minutes ago, the two writers take to the podium.

A REMARKABLY serene looking Graham Linehan (26, from Dublin) tells us how Ted was never meant to be a comedy in the first place. "Originally it was going to be a one off documentary," he says, "and it was going to do for priests what Spinal Tap did for rock musicians. But to our astonishment, the people at Channel 4 asked us to turn the script into a six part sitcom."

Arthur Mathews (37, from Termonfeckin) recalls how he used to do the character of Ted in his stand up days. "I used to be with a band called the Joshua Trio [a U2 parody band] and I would get up and do Ted for the simple reason that the band needed time to get off stage and change their costumes."

They went on to explain how they cast the actors and while they always wanted Dermot Morgan for the role of Ted, they auditioned quite a few people for the role of Dougal "Dougal's character is stupid beyond belief and most of the actors got that bit down but the only one who introduced the necessary child like innocence into the part was Ardal O'Hanlon," said Mathews, adding that they were both "blown away by Pauline McLynn's successful audition for the part of Mrs Doyle.

The 45 people at the master class, who had been whittled dawn from the couple of hundred who applied for places, were mainly aspiring comedy writers full of intelligent and pointed questions about the who, what and where of getting your sitcom on to the small screen. Linehan and Mathews were in sparkling form throughout, happily sharing all the little secrets behind the writing and filming of Ted.

They explained how and why they paid homage to their favourite comedy programmes (The Simpsons and Fawlty Towers) in certain scenes in Father Ted, why the programme was really just a disguised version of Only Fools And Horses, and how sometimes one of them gets a bizarre idea and they stubbornly crowbar it into the script the two have just finished writing the Ted Christmas special and Mathews came up with the mad notion that he wanted Ted to insult the Chinese community on Craggy Island some where in the script. It was they say "an incredibly difficult" thing to work into the plot, but they managed it.

As the day progressed the director of the show, Declan Lowney, came in to answer a lot of frightfully technical questions in a very good humoured manner and then there was a talk about the business end of comedy (finance, the role of the producer, etc) which was all topped off by Linehan and Mathews showing a series of their favourite comic clips from sitcoms past and present.

Over lunch we learned that on the RTE radio show that morning, a few callers had complained about the series, specifically that Linehan and Mathews were holding the Irish priesthood up to ridicule in front of a British audience and making money out of it.

But try this out for size Linehan and Mathews, who are indisputably the most talented comedy writing team this country has yet produced, gave their services (never mind expertise, reams of practical information and generous offers of help) absolutely free in Galway yesterday. And they were giving something back to an Irish comedy scene that never did anything for them in the first place.