father ted – Dirty Feed

“He did kick me up the arse!”

Published 12th May 2025

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.

Ted standing next to a big picture of him kicking Bishop Brennan up the arse, on location

Ted running away from a big picture of him kicking Bishop Brennan up the arse, on location

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…

Ted kicking Bishop Brennan up the arse in the studio scene

Ted standing next to a big picture of him kicking Bishop Brennan up the arse, on location

…the rug is different.

I am a twat.

Aside from the first series. ↩

(Probably) A Brand New Fact about Father Ted

Published 6th October 2020

TV Comedy

Of all the scriptbooks that I own, Father Ted: The Complete Scripts is my favourite. Not only is it the actual scripts, rather than Blackadder: The Whole Damn Dynasty‘s lame transcripts, but soon as you open the book, its magic is revealed on the inside cover.

“Father Ted: The Complete Scripts is, uniquely, a collection of late, but not final drafts – jokes, characters and scenes that didn’t make it into the series are here, along with an introduction to each episode by the authors, which explains how the insane plotlines arose. So whether you’re a fan of the show, or simply interested in how a comedy programme makes the final leap from page to screen, this book is all you’ll need.”

Seeing as no deleted scenes ever showed up on any of the DVDs, or indeed any documentaries about the show¹ , this scriptbook is the closest we’ll get to them. And there is indeed a fairly large chunk of stuff that never made it into the show. This includes entire scenes from “Song for Europe” featuring Jeep Hebrides, Craggy Island’s chief recording engineer, who leaps off the page so clearly that you just wish we could have met him for real.

But in some ways, it’s the smaller changes which are the most interesting. Take “Tentacles of Doom”, where three bishops come to Craggy Island to upgrade a holy relic, only to be destroyed by our heroes. Arthur Mathews tells us a delightful tale of an over-egged joke:

“Jack being taught to say ‘That would be an ecumenical matter’ was the inspired suggestion of (by now ex) producer Geoffrey Perkins. We were just going to have him saying ‘Yes’ and ‘No’, but that phrase really lifted it. There was a third line, ‘Temptation comes in many guises’, but it didn’t add anything so we dumped it in the end.”

– Arthur Mathews, Father Ted: The Complete Scripts, p. 120

You can already feel how the comic rhythm of the joke would be destroyed by the extra line. “That would be an ecumenical matter” is funny partly because it’s the only longer answer Jack gives. Learning what a show gets rid of is just as instructive as what a show keeps. Sometimes more so.

There is one thing that the scriptbook doesn’t reveal about this missing idea, though. Because a vestige of it actually appears in the final, broadcast episode. And I didn’t notice it for over two decades.

So let’s join Father Jack, shortly before he inserts the Holy Stone of Clonrichert up Bishop Facks’ rectum:

FATHER JACK: Temptation, ecumenical, yes!

Clearly, the “Temptation comes in many guises” lines were still in the script when the location shoot was taking place. The word does appear in the scriptbook in this scene, but nowhere else in the script – a script described as a “late, but not final draft”. So presumably the rest of the lines were deleted between the location shoot and the audience recording night.²

I confess that vestigial remnants of this kind utterly delight me. The glimmer of a road not taken, going unnoticed for decades. And it’s a sign of what you can get away with, if your show is firing on all cylinders. The above word should stand out like a sore thumb – the entire joke, as revised in the final version, is that Jack only has three answers. The mumbling of a fourth deleted one should ruin things, by rights. But it passes by without even being noticed, let alone feeling awkward.

The merest ghost of an alternate path, that never gets spotted… unless you’re on a deleted scenes orienteering course.

To my knowledge, anyway. Let me know if I’m wrong. ↩
Other parts of the book are more explicit that rewrites happened during this time; in the scriptbook’s introduction to “Hell”, Linehan talks about how the small/far away gag was thought up while shooting the episode’s location inserts. Not that that’s much of a surprise. I was at IT Crowd recordings where Linehan did rewrites between the first and second take in front of the audience. ↩

Weird Edits Part #8274232

Published 10th November 2012

TV Comedy

Beware: this post is at the extreme end of television geekery. If you object to that, pop off to Digital Spy, now.

Back? Good. Here then, is something I guarantee you haven’t noticed before about Father Ted, brought to my attention by the not-literally eagle-eyed Danny Stephenson. The episode in question is Are You Right There, Father Ted? – take a look at the beginning of the bedroom scene between Ted and Dougal. (Ignore the ad break that’s been cut out there for the DVD release – that’s a whole separate issue…)

[Read more →]