Derek Nimmo trades the bishop’s palace of All Gas and Gaiters for the cloisters of Mountacres Monastery, slipping into the sandals of Brother Dominic, a well-meaning but calamity-prone novice who keeps the abbey in perpetual uproar. Felix Aylmer’s weary Father Anselm and Derek Francis’s exasperated Father Matthew can only watch as Dominic turns every religious duty into farce, the humour mined from the collision of holy decorum and working-class clumsiness.
The series ran for three short seasons between 1968 and 1970, totalling nineteen half-hour episodes plus a Christmas sketch where Nimmo performed both his trademark roles in one chaotic scene. Only eight complete shows survive; eleven were wiped by the BBC, leaving just the first and third series extant on film, with domestic audio recordings and a forty-second Belgian television clip the only echoes of the missing instalments.
Writers David Climie and Austin Steele reunited with Nimmo in 1973 for the sequel Oh, Father!, dispatching Dominic into a parish where his clerical incompetence lasted seven episodes before cancellation. The surviving Oh, Brother! material surfaced on DVD in 2004, letting viewers see the intact third series, including the final episode where Dominic’s zeal upends the abbot’s plans for a dignified end to Lent.
Production Details
BBC One / 3 Seasons / 19 Episodes / 1968
Created by: David ClimieAustin Steele
Writer(s): David ClimieAustin Steele
Main Cast
Derek Nimmo as
Colin Gordon as
Felix Aylmer as
Edward Malin as
