The secret lives of the priests in Father Ted
Fascinating. A potted biography of the miscellaneous other priests that populated life on Craggy Island.
I’m guessing that everybody knows about the back stories of the famous actors who played Bishop Jim Brennan (Jim Norton) and Frs Fintan Stack (Brendan Grace), Noel Furlong (Graham Norton) and Todd Unctious (Gerard McSorley). And that Clare Grogan from Altered Images played Niamh Connolly, the Sinead O’Connor parody. And pretty much every Irish comedian of the period had a walk-on part, from Pat Shortt to Jon Kenny, Joe Rooney to Kevin Gildea, Mark Doherty to Paul Tylak. (Did you know, though, that Ed Byrne played a teenager in A Christmassy Ted?) But this goes a lot deeper.
Readers, I give you … the secret lives of the priests in Father Ted.
1. Father Fitzgerald
This is the 24-carat nugget of trivia that got me started. Seán Barrett, who plays Fr Fitzgerald, the priest with the most boring voice in the world, whose dreary drone over a department store’s PA system enables the priests to escape undetected from the lingerie department in the episode, A Christmassy Ted, also appears on the cover of How Soon Is Now?, the classic single by The Smiths.