Fred and Loathing on The Internet

You nuh see I and I, me coming down hot?

2025-May-30

Today we will be talking about the sitcom Father Ted. Before we get into discussing this show, we’ll start with the reason why it was chosen to be in the fredlambuth.com blog spotlight. I have enjoyed a few Father Ted episodes. They were entertaining, but there was no special hold placed on me after being amused. The reason I want to talk about this show is not about discovering the novelty of its oddball style of comedy. No, the reason Father Ted has resurfaced to my attention is because of drum and bass music.

Now, for those readers out there, you might not know this, but the namesake of this website’s blog really enjoys drum and bass music. Just what is drum and bass music, you ask? Well, it does include the sounds of a drum kit being struck. The sound of a string bass is not always present with this drum sound. In fact, quite rarely is there an actual bass in drum’n’bass. Usually, it’s drums and whatever sample the DJ can find and throw into the mix. The drum beat is usually an interplay between the snare and a cymbal on the drum kit. Maybe some hi-hat. These two things are played pretty fast.

This flavor of music nestled its way into my brain since the PlayStation 1 and 2 era video games, mostly from playing a lot of driving games from that period. I think the creators of the games of that era were on to the right idea for selecting music that elicits concerted effort from the audience. Or, I tell myself that and that music is imprinted on the problem-solving parts of my brain. For whatever reason, it really gets me whistling while I work.

Two things I use as background noise to keep me going at my computer-centered job: long musical playlists or sitcoms. When I need to be more focused than relaxed at my work task, the musical playlist is used. The more the task demands my attention, the more the playlist shifts toward fast-paced electronic music. On a more relaxed workflow, such as writing documentation for something I wrote during the electronic music phases of work, I resort to passively watching sitcoms. Drum and bass sits at the extreme end of concentration music. I suppose Dark Techno can do the job too.

My electronic music playlists are found on YouTube. There are thousands out there. I don’t really know what separates a solid pro DJ from the tons of amateurs posting from their studio apartments, so I usually like every playlist I find. As for sitcoms, there are plenty of lost sitcoms to be found for free on YouTube if you do not especially care about video quality, or sitcom quality. (Hint: They were usually lost for a reason.) If you have no qualms about using an Ad-Blocker and watching TV through a browser, there are tons of sitcoms to be had without commercial interruption! Father Ted was one of those shows I have only known from streaming sites that were sitting on old media properties.

The sitcom and electronic music worlds collided for me at the juncture of Father Ted and jungle music. (Hey, folks at home, jungle is a type of drum’n’bass that uses the vocals of a throaty singer with a Jamaican accent.) A YouTube channel (The Goldfish) has a number of jungle playlists I enjoyed. The ones themed with ‘Jungle Music To Play at 3 AM’ enchanted me with the graphic used for the playlist. The model in the frame really captured the look I’ve seen of people closing their eyes at raves. The comments on the YouTube playlists had mentioned the episode of Father Ted from which the image and idea were lifted. I followed that trail to an episode that would tickle the mid-90s sensibilities of my brain. The idea of a bucolic Irish village’s priest demanding to hear jungle music while he smokes a cigarette in ecstasy, for some reason, really tickles me. I saw the whole episode after making the connection, and a few more after that.

Father Ted is a show made for British television in the 90s, although the setting of the show is a tiny fictional island on the western coast of Ireland. Despite the slightly international setting, it is clearly a British sitcom. There is a laugh track, yet the show is filmed in such a way that it would be difficult for there to be an actual studio audience—a contrivance I had noticed only in British sitcoms made after I was born. The UK’s TV shows moved in bolder directions than their American contemporaries in several dimensions, yet they kept clinging to canned laughter.

I have mixed feelings about the use of the laugh track; more often they tend towards antipathy than the contrary. On Father Ted, or the few British Broadcasting Company sitcoms I have seen, I would argue that the laugh track improves the comedy landscape of each show. This opinion comes from the fact that BBC sitcoms have more bizarre plotlines than their American counterparts—at least in the comparison between the almost hundreds of sitcoms made for the USA and the dozen or so British ones I’ve seen.

There could be a huge swath of British TV comedies that stick to normal, believable settings, much as most American sitcoms do. I know I have seen glimpses of these before quickly shutting them off. What I do know is that the majority of the American TV comedy sitcom landscape is filled with relatable, common-ish (but insanely attractive) people doing relatable everyday tasks. They go to conventional jobs, live in named cities, and make topical jokes of the day.

Seinfeld, which on occasion brushes up against the oddities of New York City, is still about four regular people with believable jobs. We are expected to experience the weirdness they encounter in the city through them. Bob Newhart, the star of several American sitcoms, meets a lot of weirdos on each show. Those weirdos are always on the same set, with the same flat 3-camera shooting style, which allows for bleachers full of audience members to watch. The cast of Night Court themselves might be a little weird. The guest characters are far weirder. This show as well has the flat scenery always shot from the front that contains the weirdness into a manageable stage.

There are ‘wacky’ American sitcoms that adhere to the archaic 3-camera/laugh track convention of the thirty-minute (actually 22 after commercials) comedy episode that preceded Father Ted’s premiere in the 90s. I cannot recall any that lasted, though. Nick at Nite when I was a child showed me a forgotten world of TV comedies that had screwball premises but carried an audience enough for multiple seasons. There used to be popular American TV comedies where men could be married to witches. They could own a talking horse. They could move out to the countryside to a place full of colorful live-action characters written like cartoons in a land that defies physics.

There is not too much more to say. I’ve had jungle music and Father Ted on the brain. The meeting of my work time distractions felt like kismet that deserved recording. I had to get it out somehow. Hence, the painting and this blog post. A little Stendahl Syndrome. No theft involved, though. I was struck by a work of art and I had to do something! Anything! Something like this needed an homage.

That’s what we provide here at the Fredlambuth.com blog. Homages to the most obscure shit swirling around the founder’s brain. One day, when this platform gets off the ground and hires generations of employees, the painting of the jerk Irish priest blasting jungle music at 3 AM will be one of the relics.

P.S.

The song that is supposed to be blasting out of the boombox in the painting is "Limb by Limb," the DJ SS remix of the Cutty Ranks recording.