Mrs Doyle
|
Mrs. Joan Doyle (played by Pauline McLynn) is a character in the Irish television comedy Father Ted. She plays a housekeeper who keeps the three priests and the parochial house on Craggy Island, and when it comes to a cup of tea, she won't take no for an answer! That goes for cakes and sandwiches, too. As she said to Father Ted Crilly once, "Ah, go on. They have cocaine in them. No. Wait. Not cocaine, those little things, what do you call them, raisins!"
Mrs. Doyle is the most mysterious character in the show. We never find out her first name during a show (but now you do, as it was in the script books), and her marital status is always kept a mystery, although we know that at one stage in her life, she must have had a husband. She seems normal enough at first but can easily slip into the weird zone, maddeningly repeating the same phrase over and over again ("go on, go on, go on, go on, go on, go on, go on, go on, go on") when a cup of tea is refused. Another of Mrs Doyle's unnerving habits is her ability to hugely raise the decibel level of her voice from one end of a sentence to another and falling off the window seat when she tries to step down after cleaning the windows. Sporting a permanent, prominent cold-sore on her lip, Mrs Doyle seems right at home in this bleak priest hole.