Graham Linehan Interview contd...

The resulting show, a story of three dysfunctional priests living on a remote island,
ran for three series, and won an embarrassment of awards, before the tragically
young death of its star, Dermot Morgan. To this day, Father Ted remains a character
close to Linehan's heart - indeed, his favourite comic creation. "I always had a real
soft spot for Father Ted himself. On that show, he was the one who had a lot of
heart, and gave the show its emotion. Really, when you think about it, Ted's situation
is very unlucky. I like almost all of my characters, but I've a real affection for Ted."

Whether through a fondness for the name Ted, or simply an inability to think of any other names, another of Linehan and Mathews' great comic creations was called Ted. Ted and Ralph, the faithful, forelock-tugging gardener and his painfully shy, adoring estate-owning boss, became an enduring feature of The Fast Show, though few realise that Mathews and Linehan created them.

"Arthur and I were having a discussion about what makes a good sketch, and we were on a train and passed by a big country house, and we thought about the relationship between the master of the country house and the groundsman. It seemed like a good idea, because that was a relationship people could understand, and it hadn't really been done a lot. And I forget which one of us said it, but we decided the master of the house asks the grounds man if he liked Tina Turner, and something about that idea made us both laugh."

Linehan's next great sitcom, Black Books, was written in conjunction with one of its stars, Dylan Moran. Like Father Ted, it won a clutch of awards, including the best sitcom BAFTA, and like Father Ted, it featured three dysfunctional people thrown together by mutual dependence. The IT Crowd is based upon a similar conceit. Although the setting, in the IT department of a successful London company, is very different, the dingy basement office is populated by two computer geeks and their only moderately less feckless female boss.

"The three people together, especially the thing of two guys and a girl, is a pretty powerful set up. You could possibly transfer everyone from Seinfeld onto the show. I don't know if it's intentional, it's sometimes just the way things turn out. It's the right amount for a sitcom, though. It's a manageable amount of people."

The acknowledgement of Seinfeld as an influence is one that Linehan has made throughout his career, as he confirms. "I'm very interested in the mechanics of script writing, and Seinfeld seems to be, on a structural level, the best-written sitcom ever. That's a big influence. And I've always been a huge Woody Allen fan. My writing was very influenced by him - especially his prose writing - the comic pieces that he did for the New Yorker. When I was a kid, I actually stole a lot of his material to use in debates that I was doing in class. So I guess Jewish New York comedians are pretty big on my list."