The priests are back in town . . . in a stroke of scheduling serendipity this week, those two very different clerics, Peter Clifford and Ted Crilly, both return for their third series, although it already feels as if they've been around forever. You can be guaranteed that, in media studies departments around the British Isles, learned dissertations are being prepared on television representations of clergy in the post-Casey era.
In fact, it's invidious to compare the two shows just because they happen to involve priests (one might as well draw parallels between Cracker and Frasier because they're both about shrinks). Fathers Clifford and Crilly come from opposite ends of the light entertainment spectrum and appeal to very different audiences.
It looks like make or break time for both shows, with Ted co-writer Arthur Mathews declaring that he'll put off a decision on a further series until he sees how this one is received. When it comes to Ballykissangel, such decisions are too important to be left to mere writers - the show is a powerful weapon for the BBC in the Sunday night ratings-wars, as evidenced by ITV's scheduling of a special, feature-length episode of Taggart in direct opposition tomorrow. The Ballykissangel juggernaut is already committed to series four, which starts shooting soon in Wicklow, although it remains to be seen how audiences will react to the doublewhammy departure of Stephen Tompkinson and Dervla Kirwan at the end of this run (we're promised some serious tear-jerking in the final episode). One can hardly imagine Ted continuing without even one of its four protagonists, but Ballykissangel is designed by its producers to be more than the sum of its parts - rumour has it that the axe fell because Tompkinson and Kirwan were getting too uppity in their demands.
This week's storylines speak volumes about the different natures of the two shows. Ballykissangel goes for that old chestnut, the miraculous statue, with the usual connivers and crafty peasants looking to make a fast buck from the phenomenon. On Friday, in contrast, Ted falls foul of Craggy Island's surprisingly large Chinese community when spotted wearing a lampshade and making slitty eyes, leading him to increasingly absurd lengths of political correctness in attempting to redress the damage. British viewers may not notice, but Irish audiences will know which storyline has more resonance in 1998.
The audience figures are instructive. Ballykissangel gets a huge audience in the UK, while Father Ted is relatively cultish, but in Ireland it's the other way around, with the BBC show doing middling business, and the Craggy Island crew delivering some of Network 2's best ratings. The received wisdom is that Ballykay's gentle comic rhythms are more "naturalistic" than Ted's inspired surrealism, but anyone who's followed the two shows so far will know that Ted, with all its insanity and absurdity, is a far more recognisable product of Ireland in the 1990s as well as being one of the few British-produced sitcoms that can compete with the current American hegemony in television comedy. So you'll be staying in on Friday night, won't you? Ah, go on, go on, go on, go on . . .
Ballykissangel is on BBC 1 on Sundays at 8 p.m; Father Ted is on Channel 4 on Fridays at 9.30 p.m.