‘I wasn’t joining him in the trans crusade... that was the betrayal’

Arthur Mathews talks to John Meagher about his rift with Father Ted co-creator Graham Linehan and why his latest project was delving into the turbulent life of a Free State man politician who ordered the execution of his best

It is about three-quarters of an hour into my interview with Father Ted co-creator Arthur Mathews when the conversation ventures into uncomfortable territory. A certain subject has been looming on the horizon from the off and it explains why, early on, he seems so ill at ease. I am in the airy kitchen of his red brick Victorian home in south Dublin to talk to him about his latest project — a book on the pro-Treaty politician Kevin O’Higgins, who was assassinated in 1927. But we both know that the breakdown of his friendship with Graham Linehan is going to come up.

When he talks about Linehan, he looks stricken. At one point, he fights back tears. “I wouldn’t be working in comedy if it wasn’t for Graham,” he says. “I recently watched every episode of the IT Crowd [which Linehan wrote on his own] and it’s fantastic. And I watched Big Train and there’s a sketch in it about monks playing practical jokes and it’s brilliantly directed [by Linehan]. So, not alone is he lost to writing; he’s lost to directing too.”

For much of the 1990s, these sitcom-writing parters were feted as masters of their art. Their friendship had blossomed the previous decade when they worked at Hot Press magazine. After moving to London and serving apprenticeships on shows such as Alas Smith and Jones and the ill-fated Alexei Sayle vehicle Paris, their madcap comedy about eccentric Irish priests was a huge hit for Channel 4. Father Ted has been a beloved part of the sitcom canon ever since.

But when plans for a musical stage version came to nothing a few years ago, their friendship ran aground. It all stems from the fallout around Linehan’s trenchant views on gender identity, which have made him a hate figure for many trans rights activists.

Linehan’s stance is unshakable but his views are intolerable to many. As a result, he wrote that he was offered £200,000 to walk away from the musical. Apparently, it was proving difficult to secure funding with him on board. Linehan refused and the project died on the vine.

In his memoir Tough Crowd, published last year, Linehan writes about feeling betrayed that Mathews didn’t support him. It’s also worth pointing out that much of the book details the extraordinarily high esteem he had for his former friend. In their early days, he writes, Mathews was “the man who altered the course of my life” and “had the spark of the divine in him”.

Mathews hasn’t read the book, although he knows the gist of what it says.

LASHING OUT

He says his former writing partner told him his trans views were “not a matter of free speech” but about women’s rights and that he felt betrayed because “I wasn’t joining him in the crusade”. “That was the betrayal,” he adds. “That I didn’t feel as strongly about that as he did.”

Once, of course, Linehan was something of a liberal darling, tweeting views that seemed to chime with prevailing orthodoxy. “In 2016,” Mathews recalls, “it was all [anti] Trump, then it was climate — we’d all be dead in 10 years — immigration, the NHS and everyone was on his side and thought Graham was great. Then, suddenly he finds himself on the ‘wrong’ side of the argument and he’s shocked by this. And then he went into a rage about it. That, and being asked to leave a show that he’d worked very hard on, made him lash out at me and lots of other people.”

Mathews pauses, lost in thought. “The question is: how much of it is Graham’s activism and how much of it is the fact that he’s so aggressive with people — which he is. I said to him: ‘Why are you sending me this stuff [angry emails]? We haven’t had a cross word in all the years we’ve known each other’.”

He looks so distressed that I feel guilty for bringing up the subject. Mathews says his reluctance to do further interviews for his book is down to the fact that he would have to keep talking about Linehan.

“He has been cancelled,” he says. “People say, ‘Oh cancel culture doesn’t exist’. It does. I remember reading Nineteen Eighty-Four at boarding school [Castleknock College] and now it’s happening — all those things that Orwell wrote about: wrongthink, groupthink” — words coined in the novel — “all that stuff. This hate speech law that they’re going to bring in in Ireland has been a disaster in Scotland. It’s ridiculous, the whole thing is crazy. And Graham is a victim of all that.”

A thought strikes him. “He actually wrote a sitcom about being cancelled, just after it happened but before it all blew up [in the wake of the Father Ted musical debacle]. He sent it to me. It’s very funny. It’s exactly the kind of thing that should be made. If I was head of Channel 4 or BBC, I’d commission Graham to write this kind of stuff — but I’m not responsible for the woke world we live in.”

Writing a book about Kevin O’Higgins allowed him to disappear to a completely different time and place. Mathews acknowledges that his name alongside a sombre biography is somewhat incongruous, but he says he has long

had a fascination with history, especially those fraught first years of the Free State.

“I read a biography about Kevin O’Higgins about 35 years ago,” he says. “I was taken with the fact that he had signed the execution order for Rory O’Connor who had been his best man at his wedding the previous year.”

There’s a familial connection too. O’Higgins’ assassination provoked a general election and Mathews’ grandfather — who had the same name — won a Dáil seat in the Meath constituency for Cumann na nGaedheal, the pro-Treaty party. There is a small framed picture of the election poster in Mathews’ kitchen. Another reminder of the first Arthur Mathews, who died in 1942, is provided by a grandfather clock that stands by the wall.

O’Higgins has been the subject of biographies in the past, although they tended to focus on the politics. Mathews is fascinated by O’Higgins the man, especially his relationships with women. In Walled in by Hate, there is considerable focus on his infatuation with Hazel Lavery, the American wife of painter John Lavery. Her image would appear on Irish banknotes in one form or another until the adoption of the euro in 2002. Lady Lavery seems to have been just as taken with O’Higgins and the pair exchanged hundreds of letters.

“To the modern reader, some of O’Higgins’ letters are very corny,” Mathews says. In one letter, he writes verse inspired by each letter of the name Hazel — it may be toe-curling, but it indicates a very different side to the man who, Mathews argues, was the most despised figure in the years leading up to this death. He signed execution orders without compunction.

There is no proof that O’Higgins and Lavery had a sexual relationship. Mathews thinks it was unlikely. “Sex was so taboo for a deeply religious man like O’Higgins,” he says. “Mortal sin… His letters are very passionate but you can be very in love with someone without being sexual with it.” He points to a book case next to the table. “There’s a book there on Hazel Lavery and it suggests that she wasn’t into sex.”

O’Higgins was 35 when he was gunned down close to his home in Booterstown, Dublin. Many of his contemporaries were also killed young, yet they had achieved a great deal. “I don’t know what I was doing at 35,” Mathews says. “That generation — those who lived to old age — didn’t talk much about the traumas they had experienced. Unlike today, where everything is shared and overshared.”

He enjoyed the rigour of researching O’Higgins’ life, but he felt the need to work on something very different once the book was finished.

“I wrote this fake footballer autobiography — [based on] someone like Harry Redknapp or Sam Allardyce. Someone who was a player and then a manager and then a pundit. I really enjoyed doing it — it was so much fun.”

Right now, he is looking for a publisher for the book. It’s not easy. “I talked to the publisher who did [British DJ and mod revivalist] Eddie Piller’s book and he said to me, ‘How are you going to sell this?’ I said, ‘I’d get a nice cover, a great photo section and hopefully people will open it up and read it’, and he said, ‘No, no, no. You need your own YouTube channel’.

“He said he was about to do a book with a new comedian. I’d never heard of him — he looked about 15 — but because he had 200,000 Instagram followers…” He doesn’t finish his sentence, but he hardly needs to. For a man who generally avoids the limelight, the notion of courting an online following is anathema.

Mathews has left a considerable imprint on TV comedy, but anyone thinking that executives are pounding on his door for new scripts would be mistaken. In fact, he has experienced rejection time and time again.

He opens a file on his MacBook. It is full of treatments and scripts for TV comedies that were never made. He looks through the names. “That one’s about the star system in restaurants, this one is about forklift drivers. Grandmasters is about chess players. Tales from Toothtown is about dentists.” There are many more, and they go back years.

“I’d say, with nearly all of these, I had meetings with executives.” Often, they said very nice things but nothing concrete followed.

I wonder if his age, gender and ethnicity go against him now. He smiles ruefully. “Yes. Yes.” Weren’t he and Linehan the young Turks of the early ’90s? “Well, Graham was very young.” Mathews is nine years his senior.

FOND MEMORIES

One of the document names on his computer causes instant recognition: I, Keano. That one came to fruition. A hugely enjoyable stage musical inspired by the infamous Roy Keane-Mick McCarthy row in Saipan at the 2002 World Cup, it pulled in more than €10m at the box office.

The memory of it prompts a mischievous smile. “I mean, I didn’t fall out with Mick [I, Keano’s co-writer, Michael Nugent] because he’s a vegan and I’m not a vegan.” It’s an obvious reference to what happened with Linehan.

Next year will mark the 30th anniversary of the first time Father Ted was screened. The idea had been percolating for years. It was an instant hit with audiences and critics and today it hoovers up a whole new audience. Other sitcoms from that era have been forgotten, but Ted lives on.

“I think it’s likeable,” Matthews says. “I think the cast are really good in it. It’s kind of silly. That’s it, really.” He shrugs.

“I looked at it recently — I don’t look at it a lot, that would be terrible — but when I do see it, I’m kind of impressed that the plots are quite good in it. We tell a story and we weren’t that experienced. But a great cast is a huge thing. I think you’re better off with a good cast and a bad script than a good script and a bad cast.”

Proud as he is of it, he’s especially fond of another of his comedic creations. “I did a show, Toast [of London] with Matt Berry, and having [Seinfeld co-creator] Larry David on it was the highlight of my career.”

He worships David, not just for how he and Jerry Seinfeld changed TV comedy, but also how David was so funny in front of the camera on Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Mathews’ creative partnership with Berry has been both enjoyable and free of strife. “I want to doa Toast live show with Matt but he’s been so busy of late. He’s fantastic. We’ve written a film together but I don’t know if it will get made.”

Mathews is 65 now — but looks much younger — and has little interest in slowing down. Married to literary agent Faith O’Grady and with a teenage daughter, Maud, there’s plenty in his life to occupy him when he needs a break from his MacBook.

He remains a devoted fan of Drogheda United, he supports Leeds — having been wooed during the Don Revie era in the early 1970s — and he retains a love of visual art. Some of his creations hang on the walls, including a marvellous football-inspired painting. “I’m lucky that I’ve got to do something I love,” he says, towards the end of our long conversation. “Not everybody can say that.”

⬤ ‘Walled in by Hate: Kevin O’Higgins, His Friends and Enemies’ is published by Merrion Press

‘Graham actually wrote a sitcom about being cancelled. It’s very funny. It’s exactly the kind of thing that should be made’