Letters: It’s not real life

Feb 13 2010 by Our Correspondent, Huddersfield Daily Examiner

It’s not real life

HILARIE Stelfox (Weekend Examiner) says her children ‘have been raised on the sayings of Father Ted’ and this has given them ‘a healthy scepticism of organised religion’.

Father Ted, which I also have enjoyed at times, succeeds because it is a bizarre travesty of the truth. Certainly there are occasional glimpses of truth as in all good comedy – but ‘based on real people’?

If she feels it to have been an education for her kids that is really very sad.

They may now be full of cynicism, deprived of any understanding of the warmth, care and consolation of Christian fellowship as it really is.

Father Ted shows us nothing of the inspiration, motivation and civilising effect of the Gospel on all who respond to it. It is not meant to. It is just a bit of fun.

We laugh because a grain of truth is blown up into a gross and inappropriate distortion.

That is what amuses us – the distortion. To be ‘raised on the sayings of Father Ted’ without any counter balance from the actual church is to be blinded to the sacrifice and virtue of the real ministers of any faith.

I don’t suppose Hilarie’s children would ever imagine that, say, Les Dawson’s gross, ugly, bust hitching, gossiping old woman is typical of woman kind.

I do hope she is not encouraging them or her readers to think that the denizens of the Craggy Island priests’ house are any less of a caricature.

Mark Mercer

Golcar