Review of Father Ted: Series 2 Part 2

Introduction

If you read a synopsis of Father Ted without having seen the show, you might wonder why it is so successful - the idea of three Irish priests living in a house on an island isn`t particularly appealing - but this simple premise led to one of the greatest comedy series of recent years.

Dermot Morgan, Ardal O`Hanlon and Frank Kelly feature as the three priests in question, aided in their existence by their housekeeper played by Pauline McLynn, living on Craggy Island.

What follows is a hilarious sitcom as the priests are anything but priest-like as they blunder from one catastrophe to another. Sheer brilliance.

Video

The video is presented in 4:3 full-frame and is only of average standard - adequate for viewing but offering nothing spectacular. The relatively low budget TV origin of the series is of course partly responsible for this, but some work to sharpen up the image would have been nice.

Audio

The soundtrack comes in Dolby Digital 2.0, and adequately reproduces the sound without any added thrills. Mind you, having said that, in Father Ted, the sound of your own laughter will drown out the sound from the DVD most of the time anyway!

The dialogue is always clear and understandable, so you`ll have no excuses for not laughing at the gags!

Features

The five episodes have an audio commentary track from the writer Graham Linehan and Ardal O`Hanlon (Father Dougal McGuire). These commentaries are quite informative and well worth listening to.

The disc is packaged in a black Amaray case, which contains a folded colour insert showing the chapter breaks for each episode. It also features a particularly fetching photograph of Father Jack Hackett!

Conclusion

Overall, despite mediocre video presentation and average sound quality, Father Ted still manages to be an appealing DVD, due to the great content, which had me howling out loud continually. A mark of a good comedy series is how it stands up to repeat viewing. Taking Blackadder as the benchmark, Father Ted isn`t far behind - no matter how many times you`ve seen the episodes, you`ll be howling out loud on numerous occasions.

The disc contains five episodes, and represents reasonable value for money, but I would prefer to see the entire series released in one go, rather than spread over separate releases, which not only costs more but isn`t as nice as having one DVD containing everything.

The video and sound aren`t especially brilliant, but then again the Blackadder discs aren`t great either, and they are amongst the most prized DVDs in my collection. In summary, the content is superb and the presentation average, but this is a great disc.