He gets a lot of scripts with dog-collar parts and turns them down. He sees a lot of sitcom ideas and rejects them, “because Ted was a good one and I don’t want to do a shite one”. And he’s got his book to promote, in the teeth of the expected Irish backlash (“It’s an Irish trait They’ll say: `You’re a comedian You do jokes. I saw more of Dermot than I did of my own family.”Morgan’s death left, along with a psychic wound, an unfillable hole in the sitcom he so brilliantly starred in.

“It sort of ends the speculation, doesn’t it?” O’Hanlon asks, laconically “The Are-we-aren’t-we-doing-another- series? thing”. But it means that, at 32, he may never be in so successful an enterprise again. So he’s going back to stand-up comedy and doing a major British tour in the autumn. After little walk-on roles in a handful of movies (My Left Foot, The Butcher Boy, Moll Flanders), he’s open to film offers. After the first series we had to stop going out every single evening because we had families and responsibilities.

He was always a live wire, always a barrel of ideas.” Morgan died, tragically young, between the end of filming the third Father Ted series and its first transmission on 12 March It was, it seems, overwork that got him “There was no sign that he might be about to die He was always hyperactive. He must have been under terrible stress – and it was all self- induced.” O’Hanlon and Morgan were for a time inseparable “We were a double-act, on and off the stage We used to play football together We drank together a lot We spent every day together and lunch together. He was always on the phone, always had a round of meetings every day. He always, even during the last series, had other projects on the go.