The Irreverend Fr O'Hooligan

WHAT SHOULD We make of Fr Ted? That's the question I've been asking myself after the latest episode of the most irreverent comedy on television. In case you've been busy in the confessional on Saturday evenings and missed it, Fr Ted is the tale of an Irish presbytery of Fr Jack, a lecherous whiskey priest, Fr Ted, a likeable buffoon, and Fr Dougal, a tank-topped simpleton. • It offers the Catholic Church no mercy, showing it to be in the grip of the mad, the bad and the stupid. Priests, it would seem, are almost as low-life as journalists although you still can't help liking them.
It is far more brutal than Bless Me Father, or Oh Brother or even Dave Allen's sideswipes. Anglicans get off lightly, in comparison, with the lame Vicar of Dibley. The equivalent treatment of the Church of England would be full of rectors chasing rent boys.
And Fr Ted peddles every crude caricature and myth about Irish people that the English love to harbour and the Irish long to escape. Set in rural Ireland, it's full of Oirishry that I often wish had been buried with Somerville & Ross and WB Yeats. Who could defend a programme that so confirms prejudice? Islam, after all, has declared fatwas for lesser acts.
Yet, I must confess, I'm an addict. Fr Ted is one of my favourite shows I'd miss the X Files to watch it. And I'm fumbling around for good reasons why its OK to find such racist, blasphemous parody so funny. One factor, of course, is the great tradition within Catholicism (particularly Ireland) of laughing at ourselves. Considering that it's about life and death issues, Catholicism is a belief system that generates an extraordinary number of good jokes. Protestantism is boring in comparison. Only Judaism can compete for selfdeprecating humour.
And Fr Ted isn't just comedy. It's absurdity. It's as if Flann O'Brien had found a new subject for his weird mind. When Fr Dougal instructed this week to make female parishioners comfortable and give them what they
want suggests to a visitor that she loosen her bra and then offers to let her have the presbytery it makes perfectly good sense within the surrealism of the drama.
This story about a bunch of priests from God Knows Where is fast becoming part of the avant -garde. It is about not only priests but the inadequacy and quaintly antiq.iated nature of men in general Men Behaving Badly in dog collars. Its popularity also reflects a fashionable fascination with religion, with "Catholic chic". Given that so few people in this country know anything about Catholicism, a little notoriety is more likely than obscurity to make them curious.
There is a further issue, which may be lost to English viewers. Like it or not, the Irish Church is part of politics in a way that the Catholic Church is not in Britain. Son is subject, quite rightly in a democracy, to the sort of stinging satire normally reserved for politicians. Fr Ted is actually a Spitting Image-style programme which lampoons the clergy as if they were part of the government.
I would be interested to hear what readers think of Fr Ted. Many may be offended by its gross imagery. But reliable reports tell me that, in presbyteries up and down the country, as the clergy have struggled these past few weeks to write sermons about St Matthew's gospels on ,Chief Priests and the Elders, • they have taken a welcome' break on Saturaay evenings and enjoyed a good laugh at Fr Ted.