Put three priests and their tea lady on a remote Irish island and what do you get? One of TV’s most loved sitcoms. The creators and cast of Father Ted explain how they put Craggy Island on the comedy map

Careful now.” “Down with this sort of thing.” Of all the additions to the lexicon of protest from the past 20 years, none punctures a pompous bubble quite as well as these two deathless slogans paraded (with some reluctance) by Fathers Ted Crilly and Dougal McGuire outside a 1995 screening of the salacious movie The Passion Of St Tibulus on Craggy Island, Ireland’s last bastion of morality.

Ted and Dougal’s noble vigil failed – St Tibulus went on to be bigger than Jurassic Park – but their entreaties have since passed into the language on both sides of the Irish Sea. You could see them on placards outside the Conservative party conference in Manchester in 2013, at last year’s Dublin water-pricing demonstrations, at the Pope’s visit to the UK and the student-fee protests. Irish football fans waved them at riot police in Poznan during Euro 2012.

From the archive: Nancy Banks-Smith on the death of Dermot Morgan, 1998 Read more

These and other multi-purpose coinages (example: “That money was just resting in my account”) are testament to the universal appeal and hidden perceptive qualities that made a comedy classic out of Father Ted, the first episode of which was transmitted by Channel 4 exactly 20 years ago this week . Proudly daft in its portrayal of three priests and their tea lady in exile on remote and often surreal Craggy Island, Ted somehow managed to be more truthful about Ireland than any documentary could be. The strange thing was, the British got it too. A Friday night sitcom had helped the neighbours truly understand, at long last, that they were not so different.

“One thing I’m really proud of,” says co-writer Graham Linehan, “is that Ted replaced the old, hackneyed Irish joke with Irish humour, which is a very different thing.” The show’s success marked Irish comedy finally shaking off decades of cosiness; one Irish fan told Linehan that Father Ted was “our punk rock”. “I loved that. Before then there’d been no mirror that reflected Irish people and their sense of humour back to themselves. Irish TV, as represented by something like The Late, Late Show, was still in the 1950s.”

“In Ireland, we’d always felt secondary to England,” adds Pauline McLynn, who played housekeeper Mrs Doyle and had worked with Ted star Dermot Morgan on Irish TV and radio. “Ted was a glorious roar for a completely Irish Ireland. I thank the Lord that it was made by an English company, because otherwise we just wouldn’t have been allowed even the mild swearing that we had. It would have been utterly toothless.”

In three series between 1995 and 1998, Father Ted became for Ireland what The Young Ones was to Britain, except that its point of departure was not the freaks of post-punk youth culture but the strangeness of Ireland’s most conservative and outwardly normal institution: the priesthood. Co-creator Arthur Mathews calls it “the mad loneliness of men without women”. In Ted, priests can be manic depressives, closet neo-Nazis, cat burglars, over-enthusiastic youth leaders (as played by an up-and-coming Graham Norton) or, like the monstrous Father Fintan Stack, sadists who play jungle music at 3am and are “worse than Hitler”. (Or, for that matter, they can be Brian Eno). “The show isn’t really about priests,” explains Linehan. “It just uses the priesthood as a secret society for us to make up funny things. It’s like the FBI in Twin Peaks – a big, mysterious network.”

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.”

Linehan and Mathews first met on the Irish music paper Hot Press in the late 80s, where Mathews was the art director (“fancy title … I was just sticking bits of paper together”) and Linehan wrote reviews. They discovered a shared musical taste and a similar sense of humour. Linehan had just left Dublin’s Catholic University School “and for the very first time people were listening to me”. “It was like he’d been released into the community,” says Mathews. “He was just very, very funny. Graham was an enthusiast; I was the jaded one.”

The two began writing short sketches for their friends’ spoof U2 tribute band, The Joshua Trio – little scenes between the songs such as “the Birth of Bono at Christmas” or “Adam Clayton’s drug bust”. They briefly had their own sketch group, one of whose skits concerned the Irish famine. Another starred Mathews as a blathering priest called Father Ted.

“Every time I wrote Ted in the early days, I’d hear Arthur’s voice,” says Linehan. “Ted was this very bland character who’d never curse except for saying a very quiet ‘feck’ to himself. That panic and turmoil under the surface defined Ted before we even started writing him. Years later, when we did, it was just like pressing ‘play’ on a tape recorder.”

After Linehan moved to London in 1990 to write for the music monthly Select, Mathews followed him “for a couple of months” (he ended up living in Linehan’s flat for four years). They wrote TV material for Alexei Sayle, Mel Smith and Griff Rhys Jones, created the closeted aristocrat Ralph and his gardener Ted for The Fast Show, and thought about making a fake documentary series called Irish Lives, with six episodes each featuring a different character. One would be the hapless priest Ted Crilly.

“We thought mock documentaries would be cheap to make,” says Linehan, “and no channel would want a sitcom with Irish characters. But that’s exactly what Channel 4 said they did want: characters that you’d come back to, and grow to love.” Encouraged by producer Geoffrey Perkins, they began to concentrate on Crilly, and the possible secret lives of priests, embracing one of Rhys Jones’s pet theories about sitcoms: that the characters must be trapped. Otherwise, why would they hang out with people they hated? They hit upon the idea of Craggy Island as an actual, literal trap, a bleak Alcatraz for disgraced priests, with Ted marooned there.

Mathews felt he was not up to playing the lead in a full series, so they auditioned the role. They almost cast the actor Maurice O’Donoghue – who would later appear as Ted’s nemesis Father Dick Byrne on Craggy Island’s parallel-world counterpart, Rugged Island – before opting for Dermot Morgan, an experienced comic who had outgrown Irish TV.

“Dermot helped us dive into deeper depths with Ted,” says Linehan. “Writing for him, we came up with Ted’s obsession with money, his fantasy of going to Vegas … We started to feel for him in a way that you can’t really feel for Dougal or Jack or Mrs Doyle. They’re foils who are only really there to torture Ted, but Ted’s very nearly a rounded human being.” From the endless physical assaults of Father Jack to the attentions of the tyrannical Bishop Len Brennan to Ted’s doomed love for the romantic novelist Polly Clarke – bestselling author of Bejewelled with Kisses – they piled on the torment.

Once, after a particularly grim day of filming, a weary Morgan asked them: “What are you going to do to me next? Pour slurry on me?” This, Linehan admits, gave them the idea to write exactly that scene. “It was absolutely freezing,” says Mathews, “and Dermot and Ardal weren’t expecting it. You can see the shock on their faces. We felt a bit bad about that.” Often the writers would break off from a script, shake their heads and simply mutter: “Poor Ted.”

For Ted’s perpetually bewildered associate Father Dougal McGuire, they drew on Stan Laurel and also, says Mathews, from Linehan’s own behaviour in moments of confusion. They had seen the Irish standup Ardal O’Hanlon performing Shakespeare and noticed the “weird, gormless” face that he could pull. “That was Dougal right there,” says Linehan. “He was just spot-on and he became our secret weapon. The show took off so quickly because Ardal was so instantly funny.”

O’Hanlon added a little of his own kid sister and a third element – dogs. “Dougal had to be more than just stupid,” he explains. “He had to be otherworldly and very, very strange. I saw Dougal as very doglike, very puppyish and lovable, and really loyal to Ted.” He wonders if they pushed it too far for the car journey scene in which Dougal actually sticks his head out of the window, tongue flapping in the wind like a happy labrador.

If Craggy Island Parochial House was a dysfunctional family – with Ted the constantly thwarted dad, Dougal the empty-headed son and Father Jack Hackett the sozzled grandfather – then the mother figure is clearly Mrs Doyle, a martyr to her tea tray and based on Linehan’s own mother. “She’s every older Irish woman,” says McLynn, “although in the course of the show I discovered that she’s also every single auntie and grandmother in the world. They’re feeders. They’re endlessly helpful in a completely useless way. They’re the sort of women who’d insist you had a brandy at 11 in the morning.”

Of all the characters in Ted, Mrs Doyle is perhaps the most universal – most of us have an auntie who would greet the risen Christ himself with a cup of tea and a pyramid of sandwiches, the ghost of rationing whispering in her ear. “That might be the only thing that dates Father Ted,” McLynn admits. “Older women today don’t have that same personal anxiety of making sure everyone’s fed. In every other respect it exists in its own timeless little world.”

The sense of removal from the real world was completed by a title sequence that showed soulful helicopter shots of the Irish landscape accompanied by Neil Hannon of the Divine Comedy’s lachrymose Songs of Love. (Punchline: the helicopter crashes into the Parochial House.) The writers had preferred a more boisterous, sitcom-y Hannon composition that later became A Woman of the World, but producer Perkins insisted on a less mocking, more overtly Irish tune. Hannon recorded it hastily in the Jesus and Mary Chain’s studio on Walworth Road, London. “I took a big Fender semi-acoustic guitar, which had probably just been used for making April Skies, off the wall and just made it go twang,” Hannon says. “It had a real West of Ireland showband feel. It’s like a backing track someone would use to sing The Rose of Tralee in the pub.”

With Father Jack played by Frank Kelly – an erudite and actorly man displaying masterful restraint by sitting silently in the corner and shouting “Drink! Feck! Girls!” on cue – to complete the family unit, Craggy Island also began to function as a microcosm of Ireland. The episode in which Ted accidentally offends the island’s hitherto-unseen Chinese community was based on “really nasty racist convulsions” that accompanied unfamiliar waves of immigration. “Ireland’s 1950s happened in the 90s,” says Linehan. “It was really disappointing that you’ve got a reputation as the friendliest people on Earth, but as soon as it’s put to the test you fail. So there’s a lot of frustration about Ireland in Ted.”

This particular episode would also enter the real world, twice, in 2013. At the British and Irish Lions match against Barbarians in Hong Kong, Irish fans unfurled a tricolour displaying the legend THE CHINESE: A GREAT BUNCH OF LADS. And in an echo of Ted’s unfortunate accidental Hitler moustache, a glitch on the BBC’s big screen in Media City added a perfect black square to the top lip of Nigel Farage. In ways so mysterious they can only be filed away as an ecumenical matter, life continues to imitate Ted.

The death of Dermot Morgan of a heart attack on 28 February 1998, the day after he filmed the last episode of Ted, was not just a shock to fans and the programme’s makers. It seemed so grievously unfair and un-Ted-like. He was about to get the opportunities for which he’d worked all his life. Now he was gone at the age of 45.

It was only afterwards that Linehan realised how pale the actor had often looked, and how hard they had driven the cast. Once, on location, Morgan had broken off filming to come over and tell Linehan: “Don’t worry about it.” Worry about what? “Oh … nothing,” the actor replied and hurried off to resume shooting. “It was a weird little thing and I’m still not sure what he meant,” says Linehan, “but you do wonder.”

“Dermot had been diagnosed with a medical condition,” says O’Hanlon, “but he was ignoring it, like men do. We think it’ll be fine, it’ll go away. He just didn’t want anyone to know, especially the programme-makers. What happened was incredibly sad.” The writers replaced the planned ending to the final episode – Father Ted standing on the ledge of a building, ready to jump – with a montage of Ted’s best-remembered moments. McLynn thinks it might have appealed to Morgan’s black sense of humour to leave the final scene as it was.

So there could never have been any more of Father Ted, even if the creators had changed their minds about ending the series – nor any spin-offs, for the only character with any independent viability was Ted himself. Linehan doubts they could write a show like it today anyway. “The stuff that’s come out about the Catholic church since Ted is so horrific, and so real, that you just couldn’t play the priesthood for laughs,” he says. “It just couldn’t work.”

Permanently repeated on More4, Father Ted now exists in a bubble of time as well as its own pocket reality. It is beloved not only because it’s very, very funny but also because it’s the last, magnificent caricature of a particular kind of Ireland that modernity and an open Europe were already chasing away. “Ted had a profound effect on Irish culture,” says O’Hanlon, “and sometimes I even think the show did priests a favour by humanising them. There’s something intrinsically sad about men without women.” Maybe that’s the irony of this most determinedly non-ironic comedy. By setting out to lampoon that disappearing Ireland in all its ridiculous glory, Father Ted preserved it for ever.

All the Father Ted episodes are available on Channel 4’s catch-up service, All4.

• This article was amended on 21 April 2015. In the Fast Show sketches, the landowner was called Ralph and the gardener Ted, not the other way round as we originally had it.