Have you ever noticed how unlikely the weather is in Ballykissangel? The entire series for the past three years appears to have taken place in a perpetual summer haze, far removed from the realities of the Irish climate. Well, not today. The rain is teeming down on the Co Wicklow village of Avoca as we arrive there on a dismal September afternoon, and the crew is already well behind on the day's shooting schedule, while the middle-aged British fans who have made Avoca a place of pilgrimage in recent years are conspicuous by their absence.
"Ballykissangel in the past always had Ireland as an incredibly sunny place, which is clearly not the case," says series producer Chris Cloughdrily, looking out at the sodden landscape from the dingy sanctuary of the crew dining bus.
"We've actually changed the look of it quite a lot this time around anyway. The colours are more muted and the lighting is different. It was always quite bright and brash-looking and I wanted to give it a more lived-in feel. The pub is now darker and more snug-like, more like somewhere you'd actually like to have a pint in. We've also used a lot more landscape, and we're trying to get a feel for the seasons."
That's not the major change this year, of course. Ballykissangel, a sure-fire ratings grabber on Sunday nights for the BBC in recent times, has to cope with the gap left by the departure of its two most prominent stars, Stephen Tompkinson and Dervla Kirwan. The producers have taken the opportunity to refresh the cast by introducing not two but five new characters. Seventeen-year-old Kate McEnery and 18-year-old Col Farrell are clearly there to appeal to teenaged viewers who might be straining to get at the channel zapper. The other three newcomers insist that their characters aren't direct replacements for electrocuted bar-owner Assumpta or grieving priest Peter, but they are astutely positioned to cover the bases left by the departures of Tompkinson and Kirwan.
First of all, it is made clear, new priest Father Aidan (Don Wycherly) won't be agonising over any romantic feelings for other residents of Ballykissangel. Father Aidan is an other-worldly type who has spent the past 10 years in a monastery. "He's highly intelligent, but he's missed out on the last 10 years, so he has trouble coping with the modern world. And he's quite pure, which leads obviously to conflicts with Father Mac's pragmatism," says Wycherly, whose previous experience of playing a priest was as Ardal O'Hanlon's doppelganger in a Father Ted episode.
Closer to a direct replacement is Victoria Smurfit as Wycherly's free-spirited sister Orla, who takes a break from her global travelling to spend some time in the village. She's feisty, she's attractive, and although the producers aren't giving anything away, it looks as if she might be pulling pints in the not too distant future (tomorrow night's episode deals with the question of who will take over Assumpta's pub). "I like the fact that she's a law unto herself," says Smurfit, returning to Ireland after starring in the costume drama Berkeley Square earlier this year.
With Tompkinson's departure, there was obviously a need for a male lead to take up the dramatic slack and provide some potential romantic tension in weeks to come. Step forward Lorcan Cranitch as Sean Dillon, returning to the village to reclaim his family's land after many years spent away in England, and generating plenty of bad blood with the locals as a result. "Sean's father wasn't liked, and he's come back to Ballykay to see if there's a life for him here, but discovers he's not liked."
For Cranitch, as for several other members of the cast, Ballykissangel marks an opportunity to work in Ireland after several years appearing in British TV series. "This is a big role" he says. "But from a profile point of view the biggest thing that's happened to me was Cracker, so my public image is of playing that rather unsavoury character. This is a whole different kind of thing. But the only thing that's difficult about it is coming into a show that's already so successful."
"Obviously, without having Stephen and Dervla this year we had to have a look at what the strengths of the show were and build on those," says Clough. "In the last series there were four episodes without either of them, and those seemed to work very well. Ballykissangel got linked in the public mind with those two, which was a shame, so it was interesting to see how those four episodes played. But also, we didn't want to do a Heartbeat, exchanging like with like. So we have a different priest with a different relationship to his parishioners and to Father Mac. It's very much an ensemble piece, and that's what we've emphasised this year. Everyone's got their own storyline, whereas some characters in previous years were acting more as a chorus. It's had a springclean, and we've picked it up and pushed it off in another direction, which you couldn't do with a less strong format that was more reliant on its two leading characters. But this format is so robust and so different to other television shows that you can make people laugh and cry in the same episode."
"There's an image which Ballykissangel has, of good wholesome Sunday evening stuff," says Cranitch. "But those who are cynical about it generally haven't seen more than the first half hour of the first series. I'd say that it's based on a certain reality of life in this country. There is a certain whimsy about it, but the good storylines know just how far to take that."
The new series of Ballykissangel begins tomorrow on BBC 1 at 8 p.m.