Why this Irish mockumentary should have been called ‘Father Ted Lasso’

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It is the best part of three decades since the beloved Irish sitcom Father Ted became a huge success but Ardal O’Hanlon, who played simple-minded Father Dougal McGuire, says it still crops up constantly in Irish life.

“It’s literally referenced every day, not just in Ireland but in the UK as well,” the actor, comedian and novelist says over Zoom from Dublin.

Ardal O’Hanlon as St Peter’s Celtic manager Jim O’Dea (brown coat) with Darragh Humphreys, who plays assistant manager Fran Costello (black jacket), in Fran the Man.

When a candidate dropped out of Ireland’s presidential election for failing to return thousands of overpaid euros this week, O’Hanlon says a famous Father Ted line came up: “That money was just resting in my account”.

“Father Ted and Father Dougal protested at a naughty film once and they had homemade cardboard signs that said ‘Careful now’ and ‘Down with that sort of thing’,” he says. “And those signs are used at every protest ever since, even at the most serious protests about Gaza or immigration.”

Despite it being O’Hanlon’s 60th birthday and a rare night off from a 50-date stand-up comedy tour, he is keen to talk about the charming mockumentary Fran the Man, which is screening in cinemas and online during the Irish Film Festival.

He plays a slightly shady solicitor, Jim O’Dea, manager of Irish amateur football team St Peter’s Celtic, who are drawn to play the famous Shamrock Rovers in a big cup match.

Ardal O’Hanlon, left, and Dermot Morgan in Father Ted.

The film centres on St Peter’s Celtic’s hapless assistant manager Fran Costello (real-life schoolteacher Darragh Humphreys), who has to investigate when the club is dragged into an international match-fixing scandal.

“It’s a world I’m very familiar with, lower league soccer,” O’Hanlon says. “I was a soccer fanatic all my life from as far back as I can remember, and in my teens and early 20s I would have played in those lower leagues.

“I’m all too familiar with that world of frustration and disappointment and occasional flashes of joy.”

Richie Conroy, who created Costello for the cult 2009-2011 mockumentary series Fran and has brought him back with director Stephen Bradley in Fran the Man, says one wit suggested it should have been called Father Ted Lasso.

“David Brent was being brought back in a feature film,” Conroy says. “Alan Partridge was brought back as a feature film. So I was like, ‘Oh, it’d be great to find a feature-length story for Fran’.”

O’Hanlon initially had misgivings about the film being a mockumentary.

“It might have been slightly overplayed over the years,” he says. “It might be a little bit out of date. But it did suit this project – lower league, kind of grubby …

“At the core of it all it’s just a character study, really, of a very innocent, charming dope.”

In this country O’Hanlon’s other best-known role is that of DI Jack Mooney, his character in four seasons of Death in Paradise, which meant shooting in the Carribean for up to six months a year. He said it was an amazing experience as an actor as he was in just about every scene.

“I won’t lie to you, it was tough – it was extremely hot, extremely humid, like, you literally had to strip down between scenes to be cooled down,” he says. “You had people fanning you and putting ice on your back and drying your clothes, and then you put them on again and do a retake.”

But he did miss rainy days in Dublin “and bookshops and soup and things like that”.

His stand-up show, which extends to another 20 dates from March, he says is “pretty light and, I would say, joyful”.

“I’m travelling around Britain and, by all accounts, Britain is a deeply unhappy and divided place,” he says. “But I have to say, my audiences, they are really lovely. You wouldn’t know anything was amiss if you were to go by my audiences.”

The show reflects on where he is in his life. “How did I turn out the way I did? I’m looking at the various forces that shaped me as a person.”

But despite steering clear of politics, there is a Donald Trump joke.

“Like a lot of comedians, you do have a lot of time on your hands and you do spend a lot of that time down various rabbit holes,” O’Hanlon says. “I’m a third child and I discovered that Donald Trump is a third child as well.”

What does that tell us?

“The lesson I’ve learned is that we need to nurture our third children a bit better.”

Fran the Man is screening at the Irish Film Festival, which runs at the Chauvel cinema, Paddington, until October 12. It can be watched online at irishfilmfestival.com.au. In Melbourne, the festival runs at The Kino from October 23 to 26.

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