“He did kick me up the arse!”

I sometimes feel like I spend half my life trying to figure out obscure production details about my favourite sitcoms. Sometimes with a great deal of success… and sometimes, less so. The deeper and more unexplored the waters, the more I feel like I’m on the verge of drowning. What I really need is for the people who worked on these shows to sit down, and write out all the in-depth details of how they were made. The kind of details which idiots like you and I would be interested in.

Luckily, Lissa Evans, producer of Father Ted¹ has done exactly that, with the book Picnic on Craggy Island: The Surreal Joys of Producing Father Ted. And the book includes things which are right in my wheelhouse, but I never even thought of.

For instance, take the big picture of Ted kicking Bishop Brennan up the arse, in, erm, “Kicking Bishop Brennan Up the Arse”, broadcast on the 17 April 1998.

Surely there’s no real problem there, is there, beyond having to get the photo blown up to the required proportions? Lissa explains it all:

“A gigantic photograph of Ted kicking Bishop Brennan up the arse: God, this was a nightmare. For a start, the photo shows something that takes place inside a bedroom in the parochial house (which was a studio set), but we needed to bring the photo with us to Ireland before we recorded in the studios…”

Which is something obvious once you think about it, but never, ever occurred to me. Of course the location scenes were shot first, and so the photo would cause a problem!

The solution is also obvious, but incredibly annoying:

“…so we had to ‘pre-create’ the bedroom in the draughty area of the London Studios where they stored the sets, and book costume, make-up, camera, actors and editing months ahead of the studio recordings, all for the sake of a static shot.”

Perhaps these days, you’d be tempted to cheat and paste the photograph on the shot afterwards. Much cheaper, much less time-consuming… and I bet it wouldn’t look quite right.

You can currently buy Picnic on Craggy Island for 99p on Kindle, and other options are available here. If you like the kind of silly thing I post on Dirty Feed, you will love this book, written by someone who was there, rather than someone who does semi-accurate guesses.

And as for the set being ‘pre-created’ before the main studio recording, it’s perfect, except for one small detail…

…the rug is different.

I am a twat.

1. Aside from the first series. ↩

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