Twenty years

It is twenty years since Father Ted was first broadcast. Unbelievable. And this is a marvellous feature commemorating it.

What about Ted and reality though?

Some years after Father Ted ended, Linehan and Mathews ran into a real-life priest – always a sticky moment for the men who had portrayed Catholicism as a joke and the Vatican as an all-night disco party. Ted was intended to be crazy and absurd, they said. Nobody really thinks priest are like that. “Lads,” the cleric confided, “you don’t know the half of it.”