EVERY now and then television produces a perfectly timed comedy - quality writing, acting and production values coincide - but recently there has been very little comedy to talk about on this side of the Atlantic; and then along came Absolutely Fabulous, with Jennifer Saunders and Joanna Lumley. They perfectly caught the world of Thatcherite Hippydom - cool, dope smoking, right on public relations no hopers who conjure money and Bollinger out of a gullible thin air.
I was inclined to believe that, for whatever reason, there would not be a successful Irish based, Irish written comedy. Such comedies need to work at the various levels best defined by one of the masterpieces of television comedy, Dad's Army. Such television requires that the plots be bizarre but believable, the situations intrinsically absurd without insulting the intelligence of the audience, and that the main characters are immediately and consistently convincing.
Preserving the integrity of these characters is one of the hardest things in comedy writing it can be temptingly easy to opt for a laugh at the expense of the character which the script has built up. Characters must remain within character, or the audience vanishes.
Even now, 25 years later, Dads Army remains a miracle of plot invention, humour and character integrity. Within such comedy, even though you might detest the freeloading parasitism of the heroines of Absolutely Fabulous or the pompous absurdity of Captain Mainwaring, you remain on their side you wish them no harm.
We have tried these things in Ireland and not succeeded, perhaps because they require huge resources and planning. Television culture in Ireland has not comfortably embraced such requirements, largely because, I believe, the endless interference of politicians in the life of RTE has militated against over the horizon planning. But we certainly have, and had, the creative people required to write and act in truly great comedy.
Doubters wrong
Had we doubted this in the past, as I certainly might have done in my odd Thomasian moment, the success of Channel Four's Father Ted proves the doubters wrong.
Father Ted is truly brilliant television. It is brilliant because it is believable, made brilliant by astonishingly good writing - so good it makes my teeth ache with envy - and acting which fulfils the promise of the words. It must be odd for Frank Kelly, at this stage in his career, to find himself a television star when he has been a star all his life.
But being a star in Ireland nets you very little money - all the characters he devised for Frank Hall 2 1/2 decades ago might have enriched the life of the nation, but they would have done very little for his bank balance; though much more, of course, for the State's. And when television life moves on, and the market demands other thrills, genuinely talented people like Frank can be left behind, fondly remembered, but in that How are you aren't you Eamon Kelly way which can turn a polite smile to ice on even the most philosophical of performers (indeed, Frank was actually called Eamon by an admirer at the Galway Oyster Festival last autumn).
Still talented, with great timing and perfect stagecraft, yet unemployed. That fate has consumed so many fine performers and Frank Kelly, no doubt, thought that was what had befallen him. It had, as we now know, not.
Since Dermot Morgan abandoned his career as a teacher, he has been doggedly upsetting the Establishment with dazzling comic gifts and sometimes amazing mimetic skills. But dogged he has needed to be the stand up comedian's live can be suicidally hard and one invariably dies deaths; and has to get up and do the same act again the following night.
Life had been made easier and far sweeter for the pair of them by the invention of the comic series Father Ted, by Graham Linehan and Arthur Matthews, and the enrolment of perfect accomplices, Ardil O'Hanlon and Pauline McLynn.
The three men play priests on some godawful island some where west of Rockall, and Pauline plays their housekeeper. Frank is the choleric, alcoholic old priest of the kind we all have known. Dermot is the keenly ambitious cleric, a marooned Father Trendy, decent but doomed. And Ardil is the dazzlingly naive, stupid priest who has not the least notion why he is a priest and blunders through life by accident, the smile of the perpetual fool unmoveably on his face. Pauline McLynn plays the housekeeper who, no doubt, cures her hangovers the way she knows best as often as she can.
Good comedy
Father Ted is a perfect example of how good comedy can be written from the most unpromising material, provided the imagination is allowed to prosper; self discipline must combine with absurd fantasy, as the two met and mated, gloriously, last Sunday in the creation of Fun/and, an Inishboffin Funderland.
Now this was pure genius that was painfully close to certain aspects of provincial life with the dismally and excruciatingly unsuccessful imitation of the exotic and the alien. Hence, we got the park bench being hoisted by a crane masquerading as a big wheel; the desk sized tilt o whirl merry goround pushed by a single man; the spinning cat consisting of, well, a spinning cat. THE LADDER which was the ladder.
Of course, this falls flat as the paper it's written on in the absence of the highest television production values - which is what Father Ted has, drawing on the extraordinary traditions and culture of British television, in which planning is everything.
The result is a great comedy that is extraordinarily clever and truly Irish. The madly zany and the sadly mundane co exist. Despair is the companion of manic exuberance. Tragedy is the cellmate of laughter.
I have not noticed Father Ted on the RTE broadcasting schedules no doubt it is there and I have just failed to see it. Stupid of me.