In the pecking order of television, the Christmas special is the ultimate sign that a show has hit the big time. This year, along with the usual suspects (Men Behaving Badly, One Foot In The Grave, Birds Of A Feather, etc.), Ballykissangel joins the chosen few. Tomorrow night's extended episode, "As Happy as a Turkey on Boxing Day", sees the inhabitants of "Ballykay" preparing in their various ways for the Christmas festivities, with Father Peter Clifford struggling with the notion of killing his own turkey, Assumpta planning a party, Brian Quigley trying to escape his in-laws, and so on. In fact, every cast member gets the chance to trot out his or her particular foibles in Barry Devlin's script, even if the producers clearly had to scour Co Wicklow for locations that wouldn't reveal the episode was shot in the middle of summer (a lot of the action takes place in a vegetation-free quarry).
Ballykissangel is the feather in the cap of BBC Northern Ireland's Drama Department, achieving high ratings across Britain in the prestigious Sunday night slot, and helping pave the way for a whole raft of drama which will hit our screens next year. The first Sunday in January sees the start of The Ambassador, another BBC NI series starring Pauline Collins as the British ambassador to Ireland, while mini-series adaptations of John McGahern's Amongst Women and Deirdre Purcell's Falling For A Dancer are due for transmission later in the year.
With The Ambassador running for six weeks, and the new series of Ballykissangel taking over the Sunday night position immediately afterwards, BBC NI drama, under its energetic head, Robert Cooper, is exerting an influence on prime time drama hugely disproportionate to its size within the BBC's overall network. You can only applaud its achievement (it probably accounts for more than half the drama shot in Ireland last year), but that doesn't mean you have to like the show.
The strengths and weaknesses of Ballykissangel are particularly clear in tomorrow night's episode, perhaps because of its extended length. Much has been made of the programme's leisurely rhythms, perfect for post-Sunday dinner viewing, but there's leisurely and there's lazy. The danger with long-running episodic TV is that, over time, the characterisations will become ever more formulaic and the performances more lacklustre, especially when story lines are minimal.
How much longer can we take Stephen Tompkinson and Dervla Kirwan glumly staring at each other over the bar counter? How many more of Donal and Liam's half-baked scams? Sometimes one longs for an Emmerdale-style disaster to liven things up a bit.
It would appear that the general air of moroseness that hangs over the blasted place is heightened rather than dispelled by Christmas - every home is an unhappy one, and reconciliation only happens when the entire population of the town repairs to the pub. There may be more than an ounce of truth in this, but the programme is weirdly unrecognisable in its portrayal of a small town Irish Christmas - there don't seem to be any far-flung sons or daughters returning for the holidays, nobody is having ham with turkey, there's not a sign of a cake, and lots of people are spending Christmas on their own - in fact, it all seems rather English. The entire parish shows up for Mass at 10 o'clock on Christmas morning, with no sign of midnight Mass the night before, and the service conducted by Father Clifford looks, well, a little bit Protestant.
As the reference to Boxing Day in the title of tomorrow night's programme implies, Ballykissangel is carefully tailored to a British audience. Father Ted, by contrast, seems oblivious to such concerns. It's interesting to compare the respective audiences for the two Irish priestly series currently produced for British television. Ballykissangel is a huge mainstream hit in Britain, while in Ireland its ratings are respectable. Father Ted, by contrast, is a cult programme across the water, whereas here it has achieved some of Network 2's highest audience figures. Both programmes have been accused of paddywhackery, but Father Ted is paddywhackery on acid, and its parodies of the Irish media in particular make it the snotty child that RTE never had the courage to bear.
Ballykissangel works to quite a different agenda, and there's nothing wrong with that, but as it moves towards its third series the quality of the writing and directing seems to be wilting - Kieran Prendiville's original scripts had a lot more narrative drive to them than is evident in tomorrow's fractured, rather stilted programme. It doesn't bode well for the next series, which surely needs some new faces. It is well-known that at least one major character is destined for the chop at the end of the spring - a sure sign that the producers are confident enough of their product to face down any over-demanding cast members. On the evidence of tomorrow's programme, perhaps they shouldn't be so sure of themselves. But then, one of the eternal verities of television is that Christmas specials, like all reunions, always carry with them a high possibility of disappointment.
Ballykissangel is on BBC 1 at 9 p.m. tomorrow.