I'd Father Jack

Frank Kelly has enjoyed a long and illustrious career that has seen him star in comedy radio and television shows, make hilarious albums with characters dredged from the deepest depths of the Irish psyche, take to the big screen in a couple of films, enjoy a season with the Glyndebourne Opera Company, tour all over and even have a single, ‘Christmas Countdown’, spend five weeks in the UK charts in 1983.

Yet this wide-ranging CV tends to be over-shadowed by one role, that of the alcoholic priest Father Jack in the now-legendary Father Ted. Father Jack has even been “borrowed” by at least one side in the Lisbon Treaty campaign.
“Of course nobody knows the origin of the word ‘feck’ anyway, not like the other f-word,” he says of Father Jack's catch-phrase. “It’s just a kind of coarseness.”
When I point out that coarseness is not a characteristic I normally associate with Frank Kelly, he replies: “Well, that’s what’s known as acting!”
Touche! By his own admission, Kelly was not the greatest scholar ever.
“I was useless at school, no good at it at all. I was the class clown, the giddy boy. Teachers would be warned at the start of the new school year to watch out for that little Kelly beggar! I used to mimic the teachers, copying their voices and the turns of phrase. I would parody their personalities in their own accents.”
He adds: “Anything subversive like that is very popular with schoolkids anyway. Unfortunately I was always getting caught! Of course, this caused me untold grief. School was rougher then, so I’d get a clip on the ear. Some of the more secure teachers were smart enough to give me five minutes to get it over with and the class would then be incapable of laughing any more. But because I was no good at my lessons I found it a great relief that here was something that I felt I was good at. It was very reassuring to have people trailing after me like a crocodile around the schoolyard while I did my bit of clowning. At the end of the day, school wasn’t for me and I couldn’t wait to get out.”
Does it bother him that he's better known for playing Father Jack than any other role?
“No. Anyway, I don’t think it’s going to be easy to tunnel out of it now. It’s odd that something so vulgar and brash should have become so iconic. There are people who are hooked on it who weren’t even born when the series started! It’s really a tribute to the writing. It’s extraordinarily clever. These days when I watch an episode I get more out of it because I can be more objective. I can spot something clever I hadn’t noticed before – maybe somebody reached for a sandwich and Mrs Doyle veering off in the opposite direction. I loved the episode when Kevin Sharkey played the role of the black priest and somebody says they have great admiration for all the work the priests do out in his country and he has to tell them he’s from Donegal. Now who the hell would think that up?”
I ask Kelly for his reaction to the recent Tommy Tiernan controversy. He says: “I’m not in favour of vulgarity for its own sake. I’m not sure why Tommy made his jokes about the holocaust, so I’m not too keen to judge him. But I believe that a joke has to have a dimension for it to work. I can imagine a good joke starting off with ‘This Jewish man went into a shop’ but I can’t see the comic possibilities in a joke that starts with ‘This Jewish man went into a gas chamber.’ But then I don’t understand Tommy’s humour, nor do I understand a lot of the new comics. But I don’t want to shout it down either. That can be interpreted as a generational thing, like my father giving out about singers using microphones.”
So are there limits to what he would say or do as a comedian? You better believe it!
"I don’t think I’ve ever actually refused to say something in a script, although I might have found my own way of sliding around it without making an issue of it. I wouldn’t refer to private parts of the body on stage in a comedy setting, for instance.”
I wonder if Kelly has ever run foul of the thought-police with his own scripts, especially given that he was a major comedy name on RTE radio and television in the '70s, when Ireland was a much more censorious place than it is now.
“I remember one incident back in the days when RTÉ was based in Henry Street. It was around the time the Cuban heel had just come into fashion and I referred to Fidel Castro as ‘that well-known Cuban heel’. I got a memo from one of the RTÉ hierarchy reminding me that we had just signed up to some international treaty and had agreed not to ridicule the heads of other states! That was a totally different Ireland back then.”
He laughs heartily at the memory. As for the upcoming Galway show Kelly is eagerly looking forward to it.
“It gives me a chance to mix and interact with a different aspect of comedy that fate has dictated that I haven’t got the chance to work directly with. It’ll be great fun and a creative event for all of us, because of the improvisation aspect to it. Don’t forget, Father Jack is a very unpredictable character. Who knows what he’s likely to say or do. He has a kind of explosive quality about him!”

The Father Ted stand-up show takes place in the Town Hall Theatre, Galway on October 22.