Just before his death, Dermot Morgan spent a week talking to Carol Sarler. It was to be his last interview. The brilliant Irish comic actor who played Father Ted was funny and irreverent to the end.

A television studio, somewhere near Waterloo. A young man, in clerical collar and odious pullover, is tippytoeing around a set that purports to represent a deep cave, some 15m years old, in which he is trapped. And he is singing – solo, a cappella and at the top of his voice – Bohemian Rhapsody. “Scaramouch!” he bellows. “Scaramouch! Will you do the fandango?” … Sorry? What do you mean, why? You might as well ask why two dozen bunny rabbits suddenly materialise in the living room of a homely parochial house and nobody finds it peculiar. Why is because we are here to record an episode of Father Ted, the most surreal situation comedy to be screened since British television’s year dot.

Father Ted is now into its third series. For all that it sounds lousy on paper – the life and times of three priests, one stupid, one bonkers, one drunk, with their deranged housekeeper, set on an island off the remotest corner of Ireland, to star two men who have never acted before – Father Ted has never once slipped out of Channel 4’s top 10.

Its consistent ratings of well over 3m are double those reached by, say, Fawlty Towers. Its cultural tentacles spread further even than the ratings: just as Friday Night Live was also getting ratings of 3m, and most of Britain knew Loadsamoney, so Father Ted is mimicked by fans far and near. Within the industry it is so respected that it has won more awards than you can shake a black tie at and, for the ultimate in peer approval, in the episode being recorded tonight, the legendary Richard Wilson offers a perfect cameo appearance.

The studio audience, caught somewhere between bemusement and delirium, has just had one of those ripples of recognition: he who is still prancing his Rhapsody – “Galileo! Figaro! Magnifico!” – is one of Britain’s fastest-rising television talents, Graham Norton. It is also something of a cameo for him, but he, like Wilson, is thrilled to bits to make his contribution.

Sitting behind Norton, alongside Ardal O’Hanlon in the full glory of his Dougal persona, is the man who plays the eponymous Father Ted Crilly: Dermot Morgan. In the face of Norton’s antics, he seems to be having a little difficulty in keeping the smile from his face.

Five years ago, at 40 – a dangerous age in the yoof-ful times of this yoof-ful industry – his fortunes looked as bad as fortunes get. On a wave of broadcasting controversy in his native Eire, he was effectively banished from Irish airwaves and left to fend for himself and his family in the foreign fields round London town.

Now, at 45, he can barely enter a London pub without some wag begging for a blessing or to have his confession heard. While in Dublin, according to his friend and sometimes writing partner, Nick Revell, “walking down the street with Dermot is like walking with Jack Charlton or the Pope. It’s weird, really. But he handles it very well.”

“If you don’t like that sort of attention,” says Morgan, with the pragmatism of those to whom these things come late, “you can always sell insurance, can’t you?”

Morgan is a disconcerting man with whom to spend time because, while offering the most articulate of conversational skills, he also gives a running critical commentary of his performance in the conversation itself, which (deliberately?) makes it difficult to layer interpretation of your own. Hang on a minute, you want to cry; that perception bit there, that’s my job! As in: “My father was mercurial, my mother was a powerful woman; these are crude epitaphs:’ And: “As a child I did have the capacity to imagine and dream; does this sound like a Donny Osmond interview?” And: “The Christian Brothers who taught me were celibate men who shaved in cold water and came in smelling of soap and had no world view to give you; now I sound like Sinead O’Connor.” And: “Our producers, Hat Trick, all credit to them – that sounds like a footballer …” The story gets told – you just have to fillet it out.

It was a middle-class Dublin family, at least for his parents, who saw being middle-class as a social distinction rather than economic; his father cycled to and from his civil service job and there was no family car until the boy Dermot was 13. His mother was a goodlooking woman with an uncanny ability to mimic, a skill that would be usefully inherited one day. Yes, of course his schooling was the traditional Catholic kind; the Christian Brothers are described here as “paramilitaries”: “The priests were the fully qualified superclerics, and teachers were just the foot soldiers who beat it into you. They didn’t beat me that much, but they had a penchant for the physical, no doubt about it.”

And no, of course such schooling did him no good: “I don’t think heavy absolutist dogmatism is healthy for the human psyche.”

Although he has railed in the past against the deleterious effect of wayward propaganda upon young minds – the desperate fear of the hell described to him at the age of five, the certainty of going there when he first discovered masturbation, and leading to the adult conclusion that “it’s a very odd person who retains practising religion” – his conversational censor is pulling him today between the truth of it and “the dreadful Irish cliché of it. Suffice it to say that Morgan’s educational years were piously dulled and consequently little further mention until we reach University period marked by the glorious illusion of being a rebel and knowing that, hey, everybody is a fasctist, a degree in English and philosophy, an assumption that this would inevitably lead to teaching (which, for a short period, it did) – and an idea that “it would be nice to make a living in comedy”.

Ah, but where? Was there a living to be made? “Here’s the interesting thing: there wasn’t.”

It is a curiosity that Ireland, so rich in spontaneous humour, is tragically bereft of a corporate structure to support it. Radio Telefis Eireann – then as now the single broadcaster – was not making as much as the lowliest sitcom. There were the self-styled working-men’s clubs, starring lesser versions of Frank Carson or Jimmy Cricket, but none of the more radical clubs that by the late 1970s, were opening in London.

So for 15 years after leaving university, Dermot Morgan made some sort of slender living doing stand-up and guest appearances in a number of vaguely defined venues, frequently relying upon the generous overdrafts of the banks to feed humself and the wife and two sons he had acquired along the way. Then, perhaps in the nick of time, the 1990s dawned and RTE finally took the plunge. Morgan, together with writer Gerry Stembridge, proposed and won a real, proper, grown-up half hour satirical comedy radio show to be called Scrap Saturday: “The one thing I knew was that it would be a hit with the public. We excoriated, pulled the arse out, eviscerated the Establishment. We went right up and through their bowels, we subjected people in power to a sitting in the stocks that they hadn’t known before. I used to do the life and legend of Charles Haughey, and the more I painted him in the dark, the more they loved it. I had him with hooded eyes sitting in the sun on a rock. I had him become extremely excited by Margaret Thatcher’s legs. And people got off on it so much.”

To the British ear, this sounds extraordinary. Inured as we are by decades of broadcast satire, from That Was the Week That Was to 15 years of Spitting Image, it’s hard to understand the fuss – even the use of the word ’Establishment’ sputtered with such latent glee, sounds as sweet as it sounds old-fashioned. But people line up to bear witness to the impact of Scrap Saturday.

Graham Norton, himself an Irishman, left Ireland as it started, but says that for his family and friends it was “appointment radio”. Michael Redmond, the Irish comedian, says, “It was ground-breaking; before then people had always been playful with the politicians – ’Our Charlie’ sort of thing. Then Dermot went for the jugular. The Irish playwright Owen O’Neill admits that it would not be called ground-breaking in England, but that in Ireland “it was excellent. There was outrage. It certainly ruffled a lot of feathers”. Indeed, in the Dail itself a politician stood up to conjecture that “The secretary on the other side appears to be trying to get himself on a certain Saturday morning radio show”.

Driving listeners would pull over to the side of the road when it was on, the better to concentrate for the full half hour. Morgan once went to collect his washing from the launderette and the woman refused his money: “You just keep after the bastards,” she said.

Then, after two years on air and without warning, RTE pulled the show … oh yes, and at the same time cancelled further development of a TV project with which Morgan had been involved.

Well, what would you think?

Gay Byrne is Ireland’s best-known broadcaster and a member of the authority of RTE – and although he was not, he says, involved in any way with the withdrawal of Scrap Saturday, he does not believe thet there as anything sinister about it. “I was a fan, of course I was. Everybody was. But I believe that the series ran its course; that it had built within it the seeds of its own destruction. The basic six characters that they impersonated came out of power and so it wouldn’t have been relevant any longer.”

O’Neill points to the obvious – that there was plenty to keep them going. After all, it would be hard to imagine Spitting Image having to shut up shop because Margaret Thatcher fell from grace and it couldn’t “do” John Major or Tony Blair, would it not?

Morgan growls darkly, “They wanted to get rid of me because I was too much trouble.”

So RTE drove you penniless from your homeland? Big grin: “I can see why you are so open to that interpretation. [For which read, presumably, you may think that … I couldn’t possibly comment.] But in fairness it would be true to say that I wanted to have a crack at England anyway. With or without RTE.”

In many ways the London-based Morgan does appear quite the innocent abroad. You see it in the way he chats to perfect strangers, in the way he lowers his voice in deference to the smutty joke to come – which isn’t that smutty in any case – and in the way he still allows untrammelled enthusiasm to season his speech. He talks about taking a plane to Cannes – “Cannes! Me!” – and finding Michael Palin on board: “How do you not show that you’re gobsmacked?” But lest we get too sentimental, there is a steelier, more nakedly ambitious element in counterbalance.

It is true that “with or without RTE” he had had plans for this side of the Irish Sea. He had pored over the television industry from afar with the finesse of a warring general given a map of enemy territory; he admits to having been a subscriber to Broadcast, the trade bible, for many years before coming to London and now, if you say vaguely, “that TV executive, Vernon someone …” he pops back in a trice: “Lawrence”.

He has read all the right books. “Like any industry, you try to study it. Did you read Under the Hammer, about the franchise rounds? Hysterical, a very funny read. And Storm over Four? Jeremy Isaacs’s book? I met Jeremy Isaacs years ago; he didn’t know who I was, but then why should he?”

He probably does now. Morgan already has his own independent production company, Scrap Productions, with partners and his girlfriend, Fiona (also mother of his youngest, four year old son), ensconced to handle the administration. There are at least four comedy and drama projects in hand, requiring as much time in meetings as in learning scripts, and he is nothing if not gung-ho about how to make these things work: “First you try the front door, then you try the back door, then the upstairs floor, then the roof. If you still can’t get in, you go back to the front door.”

He believes his efforts now are “compensatory” for his past; unabashed by mixing his metaphors, this means that “If I hadn’t been in the shit I wouldn’t be fighting so hard to smell the roses.” He is counting on “things going my way now. I’m not going away. I intend to be very businesslike about what I do and to be recompensed properly; it’s a rich industry”. He won’t buy the notion that TV is all about people in their 20s and 30s – even though it largely is – and only after several meetings concedes that “without Ted, the age thing would have had more poignancy, it would have been an uphill battle. Ted’s been a great introduction to British TV; when he came along I thought that, if I missed this one, I’d really have missed the boat”.

All of which is, by itself, pretty poignant, since his casting as Ted was – less than Morgan knows it himself – never what you might call a given thing.

Father Ted was the brainchild of two hitherto unknown Irish writers, Graham Linehan and Arthur Mathews, which fell for the nurturing into the lap of Geoffrey Perkins – now head of comedy for the BBC, but at the time a producer for Hat Trick Productions.

It was, says Perkins, “a very slow bit of development’; and the process of selling it to Channel 4 was “tortuous”. The then commissioning editor for entertainment was Seamus Cassidy, who was personally won over on a first reading: “It has to mean something when you’re laughing out loud on the Tube.” But Cassidy was concerned that the very fact that he is also Irish might impede his judgment. “I thought I would be the only person outside of Ireland to ‘get’ it.”

Cassidy needed – and eventually got – reassurance from ultra-English colleagues that, indeed, it was as funny as he thought it was. But even then the vote was not unanimous. Michael Grade, then Channel 4’s chief executive, is said to have hated it; after its first series of six shows he met with supplicants from his staff who begged not only for another series, but another series of 10. He lowered his glasses, raised his cigar in his clenched fist and glared out between the two: “And would it be funny this time?”

A known star in the proposed cast might have helped. But Perkins had immediately cast stand-up comedian Ardal O’Hanlon as the lackadaisical Dougal: “I had very few reservations about Ardal.” Casting Dermot Morgan, another stand-up with no trace of the thespian in his CV, was a much more difficult decision. “Ted is very different from Dermot’s stand-up persona.”

Two elements prevailed: one was, after several auditions for Morgan, finally deciding to audition the two men together and seeing that it worked. Between them, the characters developed – as Morgan describes them, “One is an idiot who knows nothing and the other is an idiot who knows less than he thinks he does.” The second element was Morgan’s determination. “I worked really, really hard for it,” he admits, while Perkins was slowly won over.

“He was so excited. His sheer hunger made us think that if someone is that keen … And when we did cast him he was fantastically excited; I remember at the start he was learning the whole script, not simply his own lines. Quite sweet.”

It was actually upon the repeat of the first series of 1995 that the full momentum developed. There was a Writers’ Guild award, followed nine months later by a Bafta – in the televisual scheme of things, relatively speedy comfort for Perkins: “You don’t assume that because a show itself bis great that other people will think so. The normal trajectory is that it takes three series to get from “it’s rubbish” to “it’s not as good as it used to be”. But in this case people who liked it liked it quickly; they remember it and they quoted great chunks – that was alchemy.

There was, predictably for the 1990s, some backlash from the PC brigade. Cassidy was summoned to appear on Right To Reply to defend charges that the programme showed the “Oirish” in a demeaning light, though he was more than able to swat that one where it started: “I’m an expert on mad, drunken Irishmen, so I could cope with that. And the woman complaining was second- generation Irish from Leeds. We had no complaints from Ireland.”

The Catholic Church made no noise about it at all. Morgan surmises that it has enough troubles on its hands. “Being exposed with all their dirty deeds, the last thing they’re going to worry about is a sitcom. After all, let’s be straight here, it’s not social documentary, is it?”

If the church did much to blight his younger years, its surreal pastiche is doing more to light his older ones. But surely now, be honest here, there must be an element of revenge in the chance of public parody of those men? “No. They’re dead now. The clerics are shot, gone, beaten, a spent force; what would I get out of revenge? You move on to the next thing.” As far as Father Ted is concerned, he says on the one hand that this is positively “my last outing in a dog collar”, then later amends that to “Saying adieu to Ted would be the act of an ingrate.” Geoffrey Perkins probably has it right when he says, “They are all smart enough never to say never.”

Meanwhile, as the projects trundle forward, the aggressive satirist of the 1980s is quite the cirumspect of the 1990s: television executives are all “clever boys and girls”, on the Irish peace talks Morgan is “as agnostic as most people”, and controversy is to be avoided. Even gentle controversy: when O’Hanlon confides to us that “You don’t need to be able to act for TV or film, just to resist the temptation to overract” – absurdly modest, some might say, given his own superlative performances – Morgan is not rising either to the bait or to the discussion: “Ardal can say those things. He knows how to lob the old hand grenade.”

Morgan’s repertoire of jokes, now, is marked by television industry jokes. Ask him if he wants to direct and he says no, then says, “You know this one? The Pope calls on Mother Theresa and wants to give her any favour or honour for her kindness and her selflessness, for her work in abject poverty, and he says to her, is there anything I can do for you? ‘There is just one thing,’ she says, `I’ve always wanted to direct’ …”

It’s all very merry, very jolly and very, very determined. You come away with the fancy that he may have been the last man on the boat – but that, now he is afloat, Dermot Morgan is also going to be the last to rock it.