Arthur Mathews
Three of the funniest comedies these islands have produced in thirty years carry Arthur Mathews's name, and his is not the name most people remember. With Graham Linehan he co-created Father Ted, and Big Train after it. With Matt Berry he co-created Toast of London. Paul Woodfull belongs on that list too. Around and before all of it he wrote for Harry Enfield and Chums, The Fast Show, The Day Today and Brass Eye, which between them are close to a complete map of where British comedy was funny in the 1990s.
He acts as well, mostly in small deadpan parts inside other people's shows and his own. He is Father Billy Kerrigan in Father Ted, Paul Tool in I'm Alan Partridge, and the voice of Niall the Rabbit in I Am Not an Animal. None of these are large. All of them are placed where a writer would place himself, in the corner of the frame doing the joke nobody else wanted.
The writing has a consistent engine across the decades: an absurd premise stated completely flatly, then played straight by people who can see nothing odd about it. It powered a 1990s sitcom about priests and it still powered Toast of London nearly two decades later, which is a longer half-life than most comic sensibilities manage.
TV (5)
Where to start with Arthur Mathews
Watch Father Ted. It is the reason the rest of this list exists, Mathews is in it as well as behind it as Father Billy Kerrigan, and it has aged better than almost anything else from its decade.
After that, pick your era. Toast of London is the late model, louder and more surreal, written with Matt Berry and built entirely around one preposterous man. I'm Alan Partridge is not his show, but his small part sits inside the best British comedy of its year and tells you the company he was keeping. I Am Not an Animal is the deep cut, an animated series he voices, and the one to try if you want to see how strange his instincts get when no sitcom shape is holding them in.