For the week of St. Patrick's Day, who better to add to my roll call of strangely inspiring pissheads than the ultimate stereotypical drunken Irishman, Father Jack Hackett?
Father Jack, of course, was the oldest of the three disgraced Irish Catholic priests banished by the Church to share a house in the remote and desolate parish of Craggy Island - in Channel 4's surreal cult sitcom of the mid-90s, Father Ted. He was a thoroughly scary loon, a wild-eyed, wild-haired senile alcholic who spent most of his time slumped in a catatonic stupor - the only motivating force in his life being his singleminded pursuit of the booze. Indeed, "Drink!", his signature demented battlecry, was just about the only word in his vocabulary; he rarely said anything else, other than "Feck!" (a term popularised by the show as a would-be inoffensive variant on fuck) - and, occasionally, "Arse!" or "Girrls!!" (I wonder how Frank Kelly, the distinguished Irish character actor who played him, feels about being best remembered, after such a long and diverse career, for this one rather limited role.)
Darn it! Blogger is still without a working picture upload. And the Channel 4 folks seem to have been ruthlessly efficient in disabling embedding from all the many clips of the show on YouTube - so you'll just have to follow this link to Father Jack's finest moment: a plane full of priests seems about to crash; amiable do-gooder Father Ted organises an essay competition to decide who should get the two parachutes on board; Father Jack in the meantime takes matters into his own hands....
[P.S. I've managed to circumvent Blogger's galling 'no photos' glitch by reverting to the old 'compose' interface. Sigh. A low-tech and rather unsatisfying 'solution', but you have to go with whatever works.]
No comments:
Post a Comment