I just watched the latest episode of Farscape, which aired in the States over the weekend, and which I snurched from an undisclosed source today. It wasn't a great episode, it lacked substance and wit. But the thing I noticed most was a particular one-off animatronic character they put into the episode - a priest.
This is a picture of Father Jack Hackett from the much-loved, surreal Irish sit-com Father Ted.
(image linked from the Father Jack Fan Club)
Anyone who's seen Father Ted more than once is pretty familiar with Jack's beloved distinctive features. So I was surprised to see a character - a priest, no less - in a Farscape episode, bearing an uncanny resemblance to Father Hackett up there. Sure, he has horns, and his bad eye is on the wrong side, but the two look basically the same.
No, please bear with me. This isn't one of those things where I say how much the Queen Mum looks like Emperor Palpatine or something (and thanks to Tachyon TV for that sterling example of the form, though the rest of the site is quite funny. Really). This is an uncanny, surely-no-coincidence resemblance to a character from a cult Irish situation comedy! Honestly.
See for yourself and draw your own conclusion:
I wonder what happened. Maybe staff at Jim Henson's Creature Shop in London made the puppet for a laugh and it ended up being pulled into service on camera (with a few changes of course). Maybe they did it as an intentional homage to a character on a show which, at least in their show's primarily American demographic, is fairly obscure. I doubt we'll ever know.
But I for one am convinced that there's some hand behind this (oh, ha ha). I think that whoever designed this puppet to be used on a big-budget joint American/Australian television production was just a tiny bit influenced by the heavily made-up features of Frank Kelly in his role as a drunken, filthy Irish priest in a late 1990s Channel 4 sitcom little known outside Britain.
I just can't figure out how.
Update: That was weblog entry #100.