THE spice Girls are in Ardal's dressing room, Sylvester Stallone is hanging around the corridor and a man in the audience has paid £1,000 just to be here: it's the live recording of the Father Ted Christmas special in a London TV studio and up in the green room the stories are buzzing about the following...
"Did you hear that Bono said he would clear his diary if he had a chance to be in the show?"
"I believe all the schools in Co Clare were given a half-day when they were down filming the exterior shots in November."
I hear the Gallagher brothers are double mad for it."
"Did you see all those signs outside the pubs, saying they were showing the show on special big screens just like the World Cup matches - it's mad isn't it?"
Sure is, but that's not the half of it - wait till you meet the Ted Heads.
Back in the studio, it's lights, camera, action. The show's stars are greeted with manic waves of applause as they stroll out onto the set (a small three-piece affair featuring Ted and Dougal's bedroom, the bathroom and the living room). The half-hour show you see on television takes about three hours to film in front of a live audience - and that's not including the exterior shots which are usually filmed months previously on location in Ireland. As the actors ready themselves, a warm-up act loosens them up and gets them into chuckle mode. Because there are a lot of Ted Heads (see below) in the audience tonight, the warm-up conducts a Father Ted trivia quiz. The 400-strong crowd displays thoroughly unhealthy knowledge of even the most arcane aspects of the show.
Ted Heads are the Trekkies of the 1990s, they are the show's obsessive fans who know all the lines all the plots and all the facial expressions of each and every episode - and they're not slow to let you know it. They're all over the Internet, they play Father Ted drinking games (don't ask) and they have a very annoying habit of saying "drink, girls, feck, arse" at any available opportunity. On a comedy catchphrase level, they're up there with the guy at the party (there's always one) who just insists on reciting the whole Monty Python Dead Parrot Sketch.
All the exterior shots for the special were shot in and around Ennistimon, Co Clare, in November and these are shown on videotape, in chronological order, to the studio audience so they can get a handle on the plot. The pace moves briskly along until an actor fluffs his lines/a prop doesn't work/the director isn't happy with something or a million other television studios conspire to mean that a scene has to be shot and re-shot again. During the breaks between shots, people walk around with walkie-talkies, make-up artists do their thing, cameras swivel around and the warmup man comes back on to tell a few gags and ask some more Ted trivia questions.
Despite the fact that Father Ted only manages to get a quarter of the ratings of shows such as Men Behaving Badly and One Foot In The Grave, its impact on popular culture - particularly youth culture - is huge. Just as schoolyards in times past resounded to the sound of teenagers re-enacting scenes from last night's Pete 'n Dud, Python. Young Ones and Blackadder, these days it's all about Irish accents, imitation clerical collars and impenetrable lines like "Ted, can I have a Pop Tart?"
The cast is in good form tonight and when the cameras aren't rolling, the actors ad-lib with the audience, annoy the warm-up man and generally try to keep everyone entertained. At the end of the filming, Mrs Doyle decides to sexually assault Father Ted while Father Dougal contents himself with cursing in a most unclerical manner.
Major figures in the British comedy industry are now talking about the show as being "the Fawlty Towers of the 90s". Whatever about that, it has carved out a unique position for itself in the annals of television comedy by being, at one and the same time, a cutting-edge programme with major mainstream appeal.
This was not readily apparent when it was first broadcast in 1994. The first few shows were met by critical indifference and the only reaction it provoked was a number of complaints from the Irish community in Britain which said it reinforced Oirish stereotypes despite the fact that everyone who works on the show - from writers, to director, to cast, to crew - is Irish.
WHEN people started to look beyond the clerical collars, the bottle of whiskey and the religious icons, they found that the gently surreal tale of three priests banished to an island off the west coast was coming down with all manner of comic inventiveness and imagination, reminiscent in moments of Flann O'Brien's skillfully crafted irreverence.
By the time the second series finished earlier this year, Father Ted had become Channel 4's most watched programme (after Brookside), it had picked up a small coachload of awards (including BAFTA, Screenwriter Guild and British Comedy awards, as well as an Emmy nomination in the US), the show's stars - Dermot Morgan, Ardal O'Hanlon, Frank Kelly and Pauline McLynn - had become British household names and the word "leek" had made it into the 1996 Dictionary of Popular Usage.
It's a little known fact, but U2 are responsible for Father Ted. Back in the late 1980s, when U2 hagiography was at its height, Arthur Mathews (one of the show's writers) and a friend formed a U2 parody group called The Joshua Trio. During costume changes, Mathews would do a stand-up character called Father Ted Crilly, a feckless creation who would bore his congregation stupid with witless tales about folk Masses and the need for ecumenism.
Years later when Mathews moved to London and teamed up with Graham Linehan (Ted's co-writer), they started writing sketches for Alexei Sayle and Steve Coogan. The two of them decided to dust off the character of Father Ted Crilly, place him in clerical Siberia (the Craggy Island of the show) and have him sharing a rambling parochial house with an offensive old drunk (Father Jack Hackett), a terminally stupid younger priest (Father Dougal McGuire) and a pre-feminist housekeeper (Mrs Doyle).
Mathews, being a shy and retiring type, decided not to cast himself in the show. Structurally Father Ted is based on Only Fools And Horses - rude old man, middle-aged man who thinks he's clever but isn't and dim-witted younger man. Crucially, though, the show eschews the traditional linear narrative of British sitcoms, the type of classic narrative which has allowed Man About The House to be re-created as Men Behaving Badly and Alf Garnet to return, albeit more bourgeois and more Home Counties, as Victor Meldrew.
Father Ted doesn't take on board such time-honoured conventions, and by remaining offside in comedy writing terms (due to its sheer implausibility) it is one of the most challenging and rewarding pieces of sitcom writing since Gallon and Simpson put words into Tony Hancock's mouth.
Mathews and Linehan - who, incidentally, are known as "the new Gallon and Simpson" in Soho brasserie circles - bring two very different cultural experiences to bear on the show's scripts. Mathews(38), from Termonfeckin, Co Louth, has long been fascinated by the question: "What do priests do all day?" - which is the premise on which the show is built - and he brings all the history and knowledge of Irish clerical life to the show. In real life, two of his uncles are priests and as he is fond of saying: "I've always enjoyed good relations with the Catholic church".
Linehan (27), from Dublin, is a child of the new, "progressive" Ireland, confident, culturally literate and tuned into anything unorthodox in comedy (Dr Katz, Larry Sanders). When the two of them collide in the writing, they pile on the layers of cross-cultural references (Oasis and Jungle music sit side-by-side with traditional clerical iconography) and they allow their characters to drift between the real world and the mythical world of Craggy Island.
The normal rules of character interaction and plot development don't apply in this Celtic twilight world: sample plot-lines from the second series included "A whistle is stolen" and "Dougal gets a rabbit", while a sneak preview of the third series, which won't be broadcast for at least another year, reveals the storyline: "Father Ted inadvertently insults the Chinese community on Craggy Island". It's all very simple and all very surreal.
Claims that the show is a veiled comment on Irish society or that it is anti-clerical are, at best, spurious. As regards the latter, given the number of paedophile scandals within the church over the past few years, the show seems like a throwback to a more innocent time. As regards the former, the fact that Ted, Dougal and Jack are Irish is irrelevant for the main part. The main body of humour in the show stems from the interaction between Ted and Dougal.
If you ignore their accent and dress, you can see them re-enacting the timeless comedy of Laurel and Hardy - two men suffering from differing degrees of stupidity, routinely caught up in hapless situations.
Back in the studio, the actors take their final bows and the theme music comes over the speakers. The plot of the one-hour special will not be revealed here, except to say that you can expect a bizarre dream sequence where Father Ted finds himself on the wrong programme and on the wrong channel, Father Dougal has to do some real work for a change, Father Jack gets left in a creche, and technology catches up on Mrs Doyle.
In the taxi on the way home, after a long day, Graham Linehan professes himself very satisfied with the Christmas special, and talk turns to the third series. The taxi driver turns around and says: "Excuse me, but do you write that Father Ted programme?"
Linehan nods and, at journey's end, the driver refuses to take any money from him for the fare - "by way of gratitude".
