The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 48

15 The Guardian Wednesday November 27 1996 Play it again, Father Arts The hymns have been given classy treatment: a 51-piece orchestra, drum rolls, harp and glockenspeils; Frank Patterson, tenor, Regina Nathan, soprano. Although superficially the afifair bears all the hallmarks of fundamentalist hype, it is not. Neither is it commercial hype: the promotion was modest. The CD's success was clearly consumer-driven. There was a huge untapped market.

Some people are buying half a dozen copies at a time to send to family abroad. The great debate in Ireland is whether this is a religious revival which alarms those who hoped a repressive Church had been, appropriately, brought to its knees or just nostalgia. John Kearns and his partner, Bernard Bennett, also in financial services, are adamant that it is uniquely about nostalgia. "It reminds people," Bennett said, "of a simple time when you hadn't got all the things that are being talked about now a purer, easier time for people." The difference is that in those times, those good old days, the horrors that we are only now discovering were actually happening. "But they were not in the public domain," Bennett said, steadfast to Jesuit tradition.

Rather than nostalgia, a better word to describe what is happening is addiction. This looks like a convulsive, and genuinely spontaneous, reaching-out by generations hooked on religion who, betrayed by their Church leaders, were obliged to go cold turkey on their spiritual habits. They were gasping for a fix of the old purities. "An association with the Church or hierarchy would actually detract from the appeal," Kearns said. So the country is performing the interesting intellectual gymnastic of singing hymns while pretending this has nothing to do with religion.

Or at least the nervous promoters are wary of having the clergy on their side. But inevitably the clergy are getting in on the act: recommending Faith Of Our Fathers from the altar, referring to it at funerals. In the maternity ward of Hollis Street Hospital, it is played all day. Now the CD is heading for The Point, Riverdancing old-time religion back into fashion. stodgy accompaniments could not have helped Brendel's cause.

Marriner seemed to do little more than ensure that piano and orchestra stayed in touch: textures were thick and unvaried, rhythmic articulation blunted and dead. The slow movement of the First Concerto had been marred by a sourly tuned clarinet solo, but there the sheer force of Brendel's inspiration won the day. In the Fourth, though, the dialogue between the two protagonists is much more intricate and crucial, and Marrincr's contribution just did not measure up to his aristocratic soloist. LI Alfred Brendel plays Beethoven's Second and Third Piano Concertos at the Barbican (0171-638 8891) tonight, and the Fifth on Friday. Andrew Clements The Craggy Island crew Father Ted and friends.

Frank Kelly (Father Jack), left and below, who has the least lines and best catchphrases A CD of hell-fire hymns has shaken Ireland. Is the Catholic church making a comeback, asks Peter Lennon SAINT Ignatius Loyola could not have put it more jesuiti-cally. "The record expresses the faith of the people, not the faith of the Church or the clergy," said John Kearns, attempting to explain the staggering success of his Faith Of Our Fathers CD, a collection of Catholic hymns that went straight to number one in the Irish charts. With 35,000 copies sold in the first week, and total sales now at 60,000, the CD is heading for quintuple platinum by Irish standards. Now Faith Of Our Fathers is steaming towards a performance version in January at The Point in Dublin the gargantuan venue of last year's Eurovision Song Contest.

Initially it was thought that the success of the record might be due to the tasteful Gregorian chanting of the monks of Glenstal Abbey, who appear three times. But the monks' stately warbling has frequently been recorded. It is the 17 lusty hymns, saturated in piety, patriotism and xenophobia such as To Jesus Heart All Burning, Faith Of Our Fathers, Hail Glorious St Patrick to which the public is responding. Once again Irish Catholics' heroism before persecution "in spite of dungeon, fire and sword" can be celebrated. They can lose themselves in gruesome notions of salvation "Deep in Thy wounds.

Lord, hide and shelter me" and they can put their divided country back in the tender care of a Welshman, glorious St Patrick. The publicity frankly identifies what is being evoked: "De Valera's Ireland the passion of the GAA the unique position of the Church in every aspect of Irish life of the 1940s and 1950s." De Valera's Ireland, with its oppressive film, book and newspaper censorship, was a country that had put the outside world in quarantine. The Gaelic Athletic Brendel's Beethoven Barbican SUDDENLY, Beethoven's everywhere. On Sunday he was at the Festival Hall, where Maurizio Pollini began his cycle of the piano sonatas, a chronological journey that will reach its destination next summer; on Monday he popped up at the Barbican. There Alfred Brendel, partnered by the Academy of St Martin in the Fields conducted by Neville Marrlner, gave the first of three concerts in which he will tackle the five piano concertos.

Brendel is always a fascinating player of Beethoven, never predictable, never uninteresting. He paired the First and Fourth Concertos as an opener, giving each its own expressive world Association carried xenophobia to the demented lengths of forbidding its members (currently three quarters of a million) to play "foreign games" (soccer, rugby, cricket etc) or even look at foreign games. As for the Church, at a time when its congregation sang of heroically defending their faith "in spite of dungeon, fire and the only persecution taking place was being meted out by the repressive, all-powerful clergy, as recently revelations of institutionalised sexual abuse and sadism by priests, Christian Brothers and nuns have established. (By the end of last year, 13 out of 26 Irish dioceses had to contend with cases of child sexual abuse, alleged or proven. In March of this year it was the nuns' turn, with cases of Gothic cruelty in orphanages).

So is this phenomenon the fruit of subterranean manoeuvering by the Church to tap the loyalty of the faithful and win them back? The Catholic clergy have even taken to recommending the CD from the altar Curiously, the clergy had nothing to do with it at the outset at least. "From the beginning," said John Kearns, a 37-year-old Dublin mortgage manager whose idea it was, "our intention was, I should not say to remove it from the Church, but to keep it separate from the Church." He got the idea when he went to Mass one Sunday evening this spring and found the congregation singing the old hymns. These have long been superseded by inept attempts at swinging hymns, which get a very lukewarm reception. Kearns went looking for a record of the old hymns and was astonished to" find they had never been recorded. When he put his idea to five Dublin record companies, they thought it was "lunatic" for modern Ireland.

So with five other businessmen, and later a deal with Irish television, he launched his CD. And the pious tornado struck. and self-consistent rhetoric, yet it was the earlier work in which he seemed at his most relaxed and spontaneous. Each phrase of the First Concerto seemed freshly considered, with Brendel constantly and playfully alive to every possible nuance. His speed of thought and finger in the first movement was dazzling, as he chose the longest and most extrovert of Beethoven's cadenzas as the focal point; in the rondo finale he romped through the episodes with irresistible enthusiasm.

It was an astonishing, masterly display. His performance of the Fourth lacked that kind of sparkle, though, and was also much less involved with the work's introspection and reflection. Some of the playing was positively prosaic, though the the second series included "A whistle is "a bishop and "Father Dougal gets a rabbit" pure Flann O'Brien at this most surreal.) Neither do spurious claims that the show is a veiled comment on Irish society or that it is anticlerical. Given the amount of paedophile scandals within the Catholic church over recent years, the show seems like a throwback to a more innocent time. Far from kicking the clergy when they're down, Linehan and Matthews seem to be offering them a helping hand.

But the fact that Ted and Dougal are priests and that they are Irish is incidental. If you ignore their dress and their accents, you can see them re-enacting the timeless comedy of Laurel and Hardy two men suffering from differing degrees of stupidity, haplessly caught up in bizarre situations. For Dermot Morgan and the stand-up comedian Ardal O'Hanlon who play Ted and Dougal, the show has kick-started their acting careers in Britain. Although Dermot Morgan was a household name in Ireland, he was virtually unknown here before the series. For Matthews and Linehan, the only worry is that they will be "collared" by the show's success.

In future, they want to write something un-Irish and un-clerical. For the moment though there's still things to do and places to go with their idiotic priests. A sample plot-line from the next series reads: "Ted inadvertently insults the Chinese community on Craggy Island." Father Ted has been nominated in (our categories of Saturday's British Comedy Awards. An hour-long Father Ted special will be screened over Christmas and the third series will follow late next year. younger man.

But by eschewing the traditional linear narrative form of British sitcoms, which has allowed Man About The House to be updated as Men Behaving Badly, and allowed Alf Garnet to return, albeit more bourgeois and Home Counties, as Victor Meldrew, Father Ted doesn't have to honour any time-honoured conventions and by remaining off side in comedy writing terms (they've had priests who think they are monkeys on the show) it is one of the most challenging and rewarding piece of sitcom writing to emerge sinte Galton and Simpson put words into Tony Hancock's mouth. Matthews and Linehan, who incidentally are known as "the new Galton and Simpson" in Soho brasserie circles, bring two very different cultural experiences to bear an the show's scripts. Matthews, 38, is from rural Ireland and grew up at the tail-end of Catholic church dominated Irish life. Fascinated by the question "what do priests do all day?" the premise on which the show is built he brings all the history and knowledge of Irish clerical life to the show (two of his uncles are priests). Linehan, 27, and from Dublin, is a child of the new, progressive Ireland.

Hip, urbane and with a fondness for anything unorthodox in comedy (The Simpsons, Larry Sanders) he provides the post-modern touches the references to Jungle music and Oasis. When the two of them collide in the dialogue, they pile on the layers of cross-cultural references and allow their characters to drift in between the real world and the mythical world of Craggy Island. The normal rules of characters interacting and plots developing don't necessarily apply in this Celtic twilight zone. (Sample plot lines from.