Picnic on Craggy Island by Lissa Evans: How Graham Norton Riverdanced his way into Father Ted

I hear you’re a racist now, Father’ is a meme that crops up every day on social media. Describing an unlikely group of people as ‘a great bunch of lads’ has become part of the language. Refuse an offered cup of tea and there’s a chance the person offering will urge: ‘Ah, go on, go on, go on, go on.’

All of these cultural tropes come from the seminal, surreal 1990s sitcom Father Ted, about three hapless Roman Catholic priests and their housekeeper living on ‘Craggy Island’, somewhere off the coast of Ireland.

Father Ted is up there with the greatest ever comedies. First aired in 1995, the Channel 4 show created and written by Graham Linehan and Arthur Mathews, and starring Dermot Morgan (Ted), Ardal O’Hanlon (Father Dougal), Frank Kelly (Father Jack) and Pauline McLynn (Mrs Doyle), won hatfuls of awards. Steven Spielberg and Steve Martin are among its celebrity fans.

On some sitcoms, the laughter track is added. Father Ted was so funny that studio audience laughter had to be edited out of it.

Lissa Evans, now a successful and critically acclaimed novelist, produced the second and third series, and the wonderful Christmas special (in which a cadre of priests get trapped in Ireland’s largest lingerie section). Now she’s written a book about her experiences.

‘This is not a comprehensive study of Father Ted, it’s a book of bits and pieces from my own memories of the series,’ she writes. It is a short book – very short. In fact, it’s more of a long magazine piece than a short book. But fans of the show – and surely there can’t be many people who aren’t fans – will enjoy being reminded of some brilliant scenes and characters.

Other than the chapter about the last episode – Morgan died suddenly the day after filming had finished – Evans’s book is mostly a compendium of happy recollections and funny anecdotes.

For example, the show had a stunt supervisor who had worked on Roland Joffe’s epic The Mission. There’s a scene in a season two episode, ‘New Jack City’, in which Father Ted is deliberately knocked over by Father Jack in a car.

Evans waited with interest to see ‘the clever, secret stunt techniques’ that were going to be used to simulate the impact. The stunt supervisor’s clever, secret technique was simply to drive a car into another stunt man and knock him over.

Graham Norton, ‘a stand-up comedian I’d never heard of’, gave an absolutely manic audition for the role of the immensely annoying Father Noel Furlong and ‘by the time he’d Riverdanced twice round the office, screaming at us to join in, we were all helpless with laughter’. He got the part.

One day in County Clare, the crew were filming some men dressed as giant peanuts for a dream sequence. There were no priests nor stars of the show in sight. A passing lorry stopped and the driver opened his window and shouted, ‘You’ll be shooting Ted, then.’

Evans’s book reminded me that the theme tune and incidental music were composed by Neil Hannon of The Divine Comedy. Hannon has also written the songs for a Father Ted stage musical that Linehan hopes to get off the ground one day. Ah, go on, go on, go on, go on!