Television: Father Ted / Fruity Moments (C4)

Re-appraisal for an unholy success and pip-pip-hooray for fruit. By Jasper Rees

In this job, you're paid to trust your own judgement. You think a new sitcom is dire, you say so. It then wins lots of awards, you look at the cuttings as a second series approaches and note that only the Mail on Sunday agrees with you.

Forgive me, Father Ted, for I have sinned. When I first saw your programme, my sense of humour malfunctioned. But like an old communist seeing the error of his ways, I now freely admit that the show is side-splittingly hilarious, that you are the most profound and many-sided comic creation since Falstaff, and that we have to go back to Luther to find a comparably detailed commentary on the venial frailties of the priesthood.

That sight gag involving two frocked men and a naked male posterior was a particular triumph - so killing, in fact, that you can grant yourself absolution for using it twice. Ditto the one, or rather two, about the priest on four wheels flying over a cliff. As for the joke involving the village idiot taking charge of a lorryload of sewage, who'd have thought that in the final frame, yourself and Father Dougal would be splattered in the stuff? A prophet couldn't have foretold it.

Because the pratfalls are executed with such cheerful vigour, it takes a while - in your critic's case, a whole series - to unearth the more knowing and world-weary gobbets of wit that fills the gaps in between. Far from appealing exclusively to the lowest comic needs (caravans falling over, old Father Jack too pissed to speak, etc), scriptwriters Arthur Mathews and Graham Lineham even run to literary criticism. Last night saw perhaps the first mention of Roddy Doyle in a sitcom. There can be no more reliable measure of a novelist's cultural outreach. The only other Booker winner it will have happened to is Salman Rushdie. "Ever heard the one about Kazuo Ishiguro?" doesn't really trip off the tongue.

Three unqualified cheers for Fruity Stories, a new series about the eponymous victual. The narrator turning a watery text into wine was David Lloyd, once an England opening bat but these days the earthiest broadcaster around. The coupling sounds barmy (what next? Classy Ray Stubbs presents Antiques Roadshow?) but makes perfect sense. Now apples, as well as wickets, tumble to the same intoxicating sound, a fruit-punch accent from the rural pocket of east Lancashire that blends flat northern vowels and a ripe yokel burr.

Much of the programme's advice seemed a bit remote in March. The most useful suggested you get going on your greenhouse strawberries prestissimo. The man from the Royal Horticultural Society recommended planting early- fruiting varieties. He named two, "both American, by the way, but very good". The flavoursome subtext, still deeply embedded but doubtless due to sprout and flower in coming episodes, is that anyone who grows a lot of fruit tends to deserve the suffix "cake", which is presumably why they bought in a cricket commentator to tell us all about it.