YMMV / Father Ted

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Is Dougal just extremely stupid, or does he have schizophrenia (or some other psychosis)? His behavior throughout the series is that of someone completely detached from the real world — with Ted even having to draw him a chart describing the differences between fantasy and reality. In addition, many of his behaviors are not stupid so much as they are just plain nonsensical. He probably only became mentally ill sometime in his adult life, after becoming a priest.
  • Alternatively, Dougal is conscious of his status as a Manchild and became a priest as a means of attempting to metaphorically Never Grow Up. We hear him mention on multiple occasions that he considers Catholicism to be a load of nonsense, and he describes having a job outside of the priesthood at the end of "Speed 3" as being part of the "real" world. Perhaps he decided to pursue religion precisely because he found it so absurd and fantastical that he believed it would enable him to go through life without ever having to develop the sense of maturity needed to face reality.
• Aluminum Christmas Trees:
  • To non-Catholics, the idea of relics being organised into different tiers of holiness in "Tentacles of Doom" sounds like an amusing setup to the episode's plot. But the Catholic Church really does organise relics by tier, from First-class (directly related to Christ or the body parts of a saint), Second-class (objects owned or used by a saint), and Third-class (objects that have touched First or Second-class relics).
  • Ted acts like Dougal is an idiot for thinking that Terry Wogan is a nickname, but in Real Life his name was actually Michael. His mother started calling him Terry to tell him apart from his father, who was also Michael.
• Awesome Music:
  • Which should also be a Crowning Music of Funny; "My Lovely Horse".
  • The Rugged Island priests' song "The Miracle Is Mine" from the same episode qualifies too. It is hammy and overblown (in the vein of many Eurovision entries), it has a vague religious lyric to it, and is backed up by a full choir and orchestra. This is a good Establishing Character Moment for Dick and Cyril, because they are shown to have a genuine musical talent and planning, whereas Ted and Dougal do not. However, due to the biased voting (again, which happens in Eurovision in real life), Ted and Dougal manage to win anyway.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: Jack's nude sleepwalking in "The Plague" definitely qualifies, for he never engages in it again; nor does anyone bring it up. Subverted with the music video dream from "A Song for Europe"; a clip from that appears in the final episode
• Bizarro Episode: "The Plague" — there's Jack's nude sleepwalking (see above) which is not even mentioned outside this episode, in addition to which the rabbits appear unexpectedly and unrealistically appear and seem to follow Jack around. Subverted with "Grant Unto Him Eternal Rest", as one of the lines in "Escape from Victory" asks if Jack's "dead again".
• Broken Base:
  • More like "broken periphery demographic". Catholic priests either think it's hilarious and harmless satire, or insulting and poorly-researched slander.
  • Between British and Irish fans, the debate rages over whether the show counts as Irish or not: It has an all-Irish cast (including several iconic Irish comedians such as Pat Shortt, Tommy Tiernan, Graham Norton and Brendan Grace), Irish writers and a strongly Irish setting, versus a British broadcaster, British money and a huge British fanbase.
• Common Knowledge:
  • The original ending of "Going to America" where Ted was Driven to Suicide was one that the writers considered scrapping long before Dermot Morgan's death. Though said death DID still prove to be the final straw that ensured it was not used.
  • Additionally, Dermot Morgan's death causing the show to be Cut Short. "Going To America" was always intended as the final episode as, in rather tragic irony, Morgan wanted to move to different roles rather than be stuck playing Ted his whole life. His death merely assured that Father Ted would never be reprised.
• Crosses the Line Twice: The characterisation operates on this principle:
  • Take Jack. An alcoholic Irish priest? Not funny, and an offensive stereotype to boot. A priest so addicted to alcohol that he can tell a wine's vintage just from the clinking sound the bottle makes and who will drink cleaning products if alcohol is not available? Hilarious.
  • Then there's Dougal. A stupid priest? Not funny. A priest who is so stupid that he can't tell the difference between 'small' and 'far away'? Hilarious.
  • And, of course, Ted himself. A priest who steals money from orphans? Not funny. A priest who takes the (stolen) money to a casino and throws it up in the air and laughs hysterically while surrounded by scantily-clad showgirls? Hilarious.
  • Also, Mrs Doyle. A housekeeper who really likes making tea? Not funny. A housekeeper whose obsession with making tea leads her to persistently ask people if they want tea even when they’ve already repeatedly said no and who even has a special blend of tea for any visiting sheep who might want a cup? Hilarious.
  • A couple in an unhappy marriage that fights and rows? Not funny. Said couple try to kill each other but are all smiles in public? Hilarious.
  • "Night of the Nearly Dead" essentially has Frank Kelly in blackface to show that Father Jack's condition is hardly unique.
• Diagnosed by the Audience: Father Dougal's general behavior is so strange that it often goes beyond mere stupidity. Not to say that Dougal isn't very stupid, just that he's also very strange.
• Ending Fatigue:
  • The Christmas special. Even the show's creators complain about it in the DVD Commentary.
  • To a lesser extent the two part episode "Escape From Victory" and "Kicking Bishop Brennan Up The Arse".
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Bishop Brennan, who gained legendary status after appearing in a total of three episodes — "The Passion of Saint Tibulus", "The Plague" and "Kicking Bishop Brennan Up The Arse".
  • Pat Mustard from "Speed 3" is also seen as this, for being a totally over-the-top villain whose sole goal is to have sex with every woman on the island.
• Fandom-Enraging Misconception: God help you if you call this show a "Britcom" around Irish people.
• Fountain of Memes: Even two decades since the last episode aired, the show is still highly quoted in Ireland and many current events will have a Father Ted meme attached to them.
• Growing the Beard: While the first series isn't considered bad by a long shot, it's noticeably slower-paced than the two that follows, and has much more of a focus on cringe comedy than the surreal and absurd humour that the show would become known for. The second series is seen as when the show really found its footing.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • The flashbacks of Father Jack in his days teaching in a Parochial School during the first series episode "Grant Unto Him Eternal Rest" definitely qualify as Harsher in Hindsight given the subsequent scandals in Ireland regarding exactly this sort of abuse in Irish Catholic Schools and Orphanages.
  • There's an episode where Ted angrily tells a cop about the good old days, when the police would cover up crimes committed by Catholic priests. The whole thing is Played for Laughs, but can come off as somewhat disturbing in light of the massive pedophilia scandal that rocked the church years later.
  • In a way, this trope is averted, because when the show was made, it was already a matter of public knowledge in Ireland that the Catholic church had a serious problem with sexual abuse: books and documentaries were being written about it and people were talking about it on TV and in the media. Father Ted wasn't making up the idea that the church committed crimes, it was just treating them as a matter of dark comedy. It would, however, be many years before it became the massive and universally decried scandal that it was later.
  • Likewise, the scene in another episode where Ted tries to assure Niamh Connolly that not all priests are pedophiles, and ends up suggesting there may be as many as 10 million priests who are pedophiles.
  • Another cringeworthy one is Jack's PE teaching.
    Teaching Nun: He's also asked me to remind you that it is very hot today, so there will be no need for your tracksuit tops.^note The implication is supposed to be that they'd be in T-shirts, but it really is very easy to read further into...
  • One of the Bishops dying of a massive heart attack as lead actor Dermot Morgan would later die from the same thing.
    • Ted remarking, "A heart attack? That's rare these days" is a bit hard to take nowadays.
    • Dermot Morgan was actually having heart problems during the filming of the Shaft scene of the last episode "Going To America". However, Tommy Tiernan (who played the suicidal priest) kept flubbing his lines, and the producers would not let Dermot go until it was finished. To make matters worse, Dermot had to do dance moves in this scene, and doing them repeatedly exacerbated his condition. He died less than 24 hours later. If the reshoots of the scene had been stopped and Dermot had gotten treatment, there is a chance he might have lived. However, there is equally a chance that he might have died whilst away and the rest of the episode would never have been filmed.
    • To make it worse, this episode originally ended with Ted on the window ledge, about to kill himself but after Morgan died they replaced the ending with a montage of funny moments from the show.
    • And the three 'Death' Tarot cards he chooses from the fortune teller's deck in the first episode. Given that it comes out of the blue and is not used for any kind of punchline afterwards, it gets outright creepy.
    • The dancing priest in "Think Fast, Father Ted" dies of a heart attack from dancing too much, exactly what happened to Dermot Morgan.
    • The crueller twist is that the show was ending anyway. Dermot Morgan wanted to retire from playing Ted as he didn't want to be stuck playing the same role his whole life. He died immediately after the show ended.
  • The set-up is that the Catholic church deals with miscreant priests by quietly shuffling them off to some out-of-the-way parish until it all blows over. Sadly, this turned out to be the case in real life too, and with worse offenders than Ted, Dougal and Jack^note If anything, the show is better than Real Life; in the show, they're sent to places specifically to wait for things to settle down. In Real Life, they weren't sent somewhere that would be good for things to settle down, they were just sent somewhere different; e.g., pedophile priests were just relocated, with little if any attention paid to how many children might be in the new parish, letting the whole thing happen again and again.
  • The episode "The Mainland" had Ted coming across Richard Wilson while in mainland Ireland, deciding to yell "I don't believe it!" at him for a laugh … and then getting beaten up for it, as it turns out Wilson grew to hate the phrase. It's a lot harder to watch now in light of a very similar incident that happened to Dave Chappelle while he was on holiday with his family (someone intruded on the family to shout "I'm Rick James, bitch!").
  • The titling of the penultimate episode "Night Of The Nearly Dead". Dermot Morgan died after the filming of the following (and last) episode "Going To America".
  • In the episode "Going to America", Father Cagney talks about the celebrities he met in his parish in Beverly Hills, and describes Kevin Spacey as "a nice guy". The fact that the allegations against Spacey are the same as those unearthed against a number of Catholic priests, particularly in America, just a few years after the series aired, makes hearing the line today uncomfortable on more than one level.
  • On a meta level, Frank Kelly's death is this, as he died exactly 18 years after Dermot Morgan and of the same cause (heart attack) ^note However, Kelly also had Parkinson's disease, was recovering from bowel cancer and had previously survived skin cancer, as well as being almost 30 years older than Morgan..

• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • On a meta level: having watched "Cigarettes, Alcohol and Rollerblading" will almost completely derail any serious use of Mozart's Rex Tremendae or Dies Irae.
  • One of Dougal's remarks about the 'Beast' is that "instead of a mouth, it has four arses". Four-arsed creations have be referred to or shown in South Park years later.
  • The Priest Chatback hotline is advertised in much the same way that gay sex talk lines are. Fast forward to 2016, when a story broke about trainee priests using Grindr.
  • Ted's embezzling of church funds to go to Las Vegas was echoed in late 2018, when it was discovered that two nuns in California were caught doing the exact same thing.
  • Bishop Brennan mentions that people have been coming from as far away as Poland to see The Passion Of St. Tibulus, which in 1995 seems unusual. After Poland joined the EU in 2004, many people came to live in Ireland, though lured by work as opposed to a smutty film.
  • Dougal in one episode watches a television cut of Jurassic Park, “now with more dinosaurs.” This was a good few years before Steven Spielberg’s now-infamous 20th Anniversary Edition of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial would debut.
• Hollywood Homely: Mrs. Doyle. The show's attempts at making her a Gonk had fluctuating results, probably because her actress Pauline McLynn is actually far from ugly in real life. In fact, she nearly didn't get the part because it was felt she was too pretty; she got the part after turning up to a later audition with a terrible case of the flu.
• Jerkass Woobie: Ted, who's venal and self-serving but also has to put up Dougal's stupidity, Jack's own jerkassery, and things in general often going to hell.
• Memetic Badass: Bishop Brennan and his cape. He was already an intimidating character, but it was the last segement of "Kicking Bishop Brennan up the Arse" that truly established him as a badass, and it's one of the more memorable parts of the series.
• Memetic Mutation: Loads in Ireland. All the catchphrases have become instantly recognisable, as well as a few other signature lines such as those quoted at the top of the page.
  • The "Lovely Horse" song. Behold, Ellis' Lovely Horse, and Rhythm Heaven's Lovely Horse Duel.
  • "CAREFUL NOW and "DOWN◊ WITH◊ THIS◊ SORT◊ OF◊ THING!" has been photographed at many real life protests. Regardless of the actual tone of demonstration. Plus, it's available as a t-shirt and gets a Shout-Out in GTA V. When he first heard of the signs appearing, Graham Linehan tweeted how "immensely proud" he was that his work has had such a cultural impact.
  • Anything Jack says. "DRINK!" "FECK!" "ARSE!" "GIRLS!" "THAT WOULD BE AN ECUMENICAL MATTER!" "I REMEMBER!"
  • These are small... but the ones out there are far away.
  • "I hear you're a racist now, father."
  • And of course: "The money was just resting in my account".
  • "I'm not a fascist, I'm a priest. Fascists dress in black and go around telling everyone what to do whereas priests...more drink!"
• Older Than They Think: "Dermot Morgan playing a funny priest" actually goes all the way back to 1980, when he would appear on The Live Mike as "Father Trendy" to deliver the end-of-episode homily.
• One-Scene Wonder:
  • "Feckin' Greeks! They invented gayness!"
  • The boring-voiced priest from the Christmas special, and his polar opposite from the same episode.
• Signature Scene:
  • Ted and Dougal protesting The Passion of Saint Tibulus. "Down with that sort of thing!" "Careful now!"
  • The music video for "My Lovely Horse."
• Retroactive Recognition: One of the priests who gets lost in the lingerie section in "A Christmassy Ted" is Kevin McKidd in a very early role.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: In "Cigarettes and Alcohol and Rollerblading" Father Jack becomes sober for the first and only time in the entire series. This development is not explored; he flees when Sister Assumpta arrives and isn't seen again until the end of the episode, when he's using rubber tubes to drink from several bottles at once in order to get back to his usual drunken state as quickly as possible.
• Unintentional Period Piece:
  • In addition to technology (like a party line in "A Christmassy Ted") and references to then-current Eurovision Song Contest and Catholic Church scandals, it'd be basically impossible to make a sitcom about corrupt and dysfunctional priests which portrayed them mostly as harmless grotesques rather than outright sinister after the news of the Church suppressing child abuse broke in the 2000s. Graham Linehan has gone on record as saying the series' innocence is disturbing from a modern perspective.
  • When the show was made, the Republic of Ireland was still using the Irish pound as its currency, hence why prices in the show are stated in pounds. Ireland has used the euro since 2002.
  • The show mined some black comedy out of The Troubles and the tensions that existed at the time of the show's production. Since then, a peace agreement was achieved and most overt violence disappeared from the region.
• Unintentionally Sympathetic: While he’s undeniably a hypocritical Jerkass, the videotape Bishop Brennan is blackmailed with in “The Passion of Saint Tibulus” is of him spending quality time with his mistress and son in America. Such a move keeps the main trio on Craggy Island, but in doing so, might have also possibly guaranteed said mistress and son being abandoned through no fault of their own.
• Values Dissonance: While it’s clear such an absurd choice of entry in “Competition Time” is the joke, Dick Byrne, Cyril MacDuff, and Jim Johnson using Blackface in their Supremes costumes would not have flown in any U.S.-made series without comment at the time the show was made.

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