`I met a real live hippie once," says Arthur Mathews proudly. "It was back at the end of the 1960s and we were visiting relations somewhere. I sort of stared at him for a while, but then just realised it was a bloke with really long hair." Despite his lack of hands-on experience with those ridiculous creatures from three decades ago, who actually thought they could change the world by smoking dope and waving flowers around the place, comic writer Mathews has based his new sit-com, thrillingly called Hippies, around "blokes with long hair".
"It's about these three people who work on a counter-culture magazine of the time called Mouth. It's not so much an evocation of that whole end of the 1960s scene, so much as a look at a bunch of hopelessly optimistic people and what happens to them and their magazine," he says. Featuring two great comic actors in the starring roles, Simon Pegg (from Spaced and Big Train) and Sally Phillips (who was memorable as the receptionist in Alan Partridge), the advance word on the show is that it's a veritable cracker and looks set to follow in the steps of the last sit-com Mathews wrote - Father Ted.
Mathews, from Termonfeckin, Co Louth, is going it alone this time out, as both Ted and Big Train were written with Graham Linehan, and although Linehan is credited with helping to devise Hippies, Mathews did the bulk of the writing. He's pleased in that the new show helps him to get away from matters clerical and Craggy. "I think we distanced ourselves from Ted with Big Train, which was a sketch show, but in this new sit-com, we only have English actors and it very much deals with a particular type of English person. It's nice to be able to vary things around a bit," he says.
Mathews got the idea for Hippies after reading Richard Neville's biography. Neville was the editor of the famous counter-culture magazine, Oz, which became quite a cause celebre for the longhaired people of the time when it was brought to court to face charges of obscenity (something to do with a cartoon strip featuring Rupert the Bear doing something "naughty"). Picking up on the chance to do something with the counter-culture movement, Mathews then read a few more books from the era to get more a feel for the times. He stresses though, that it's not a period piece and shouldn't be watched as such.
"In ways it's wilfully ignorant about the 1960s and I think that people from that time will watch it and think `well, it wasn't really like that back then' but that's not the point of the show. It's more of an impressionistic take on the era and what it's really about is the relative innocence of the times. These people really believed they could change the world - there were some tremendous advances and breakthroughs made during the space of a few small years and there was a sense of radical change. Although how anybody thought they could change the world by staying in bed for a week is beyond me," he says.
While Simon Pegg plays the "enthusiastic buffoon" editor of Mouth, Sally Phillips plays a character called Jill, someone who wants to be a feminist but isn't really quite sure what it entails. "Such is the naivety of the people on the magazine, that even in those tumultuous times of social change, Jill is still the magazine's women's editor. She's a faint-hearted feminist type who is struggling with her role. I think there was a lot made at the time that the pill would revolutionise women's place in society but this character represents a bit of the uncertainty women felt in the changing social order," he says.
With plenty of counter-culture magazines still in existence, why go back three decades for your setting? "It just wouldn't work these days, these are much more cynical times. I remember looking back at old Pathe newsreels from the times and it was a bit of shock to the system to see how different things were back then."
Why are hippies generally despised by this present generation? "Well, I suppose this present generation went through the punk rock experience and there was always the John Lydon quote `Never trust a hippie' and a general disdain for how they sold out. They did go up a lot of blind alleys," he says.
Having already enjoyed considerable success with his sitcoms, Mathews is now busy writing a novel about Irish social history. His first foray into this field, a novel about a Fianna Fail TD and a Fine Gael having an affair, was deemed "too strong" to be published. This new one though, about an Irish civil servant, should be published soon.
Meanwhile, ex Fr Ted character Ardal O'Hanlon returns to television early next year in his new sit-com called My Hero, in which he plays a character called George Sunday who by day runs a health food shop, but by night becomes a superhero called Thermo-Man. And later this month, Perrier award winner and the host of BBC's Stand Up Show, Tommy Tiernan makes his debut in a sit-com called Small Potatoes where he plays a media studies graduate who works in a videoshop - the show also features one quarter of the Goodness Gracious Me team. Isn't it nice to see RTE generously stepping aside and letting British television stations sign up most of the comedic talent in the country?
Hippies is on BBC2 on Friday at 10 p.m.