Like all the best comedies, Wide Open Spaces has loneliness, misery and betrayal at its heart. Its central odd couple Myles (Ardal O'Hanlon) and Austin (Ewen Bremner) are the kind of best friends who can't really recall why they became best friends. Myles is a morose pseudo-intellectual, while Austin has the irrepressible and often misguided enthusiasm of a five-year-old; their interaction is characterised by weariness on one side and frustration on the other. Both hampered by debt, the pair have accepted work with dilapidated entrepreneur Gerald (Owen Roe), who is giving rural Ireland what it has so long lacked: a Famine theme park. Gerald's little scheme is fraught with anxiety and corruption, providing a sly microcosm of everything that is rotten in Irish public life (a recent report estimated that bribes, backhanders and ‘favours’ in high places could be costing the Irish economy €3 billion a year in lost revenue and foreign investment). Myles – embodying the jaded, cynical intellectual – adopts the philosophy "if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em", and tries his own ham-fisted brand of profiteering – while Austin becomes sweetly enthusiastic about the ludicrous task of building Gerard’s miserablist tourist attraction. If Gerard’s loopy brand of heritage exploitation represents one pole of Irish cultural life, another – aspirational, high-end, experimental, dare one say pretentious – is embodied by aristocratic gallery owner Leonie (Morwenna Banks), who baffles innocent Austin with her exhibition of video art. Screenwriter Arthur Mathews was the co-creator of Father Ted, and the warm, weird wit of that show is much in evidence here – but even Craggy Island never witnessed anything as grotesque as a search for particularly slender local girls to embody famine victims for the paying public. The ghosts of Flann O’Brien and Samuel Beckett are also at play: beneath the smalltown surrealism, beyond the craic, there’s a sense of defeatedness and endless repetition that gives this film a poignant edge. This blend of the dark and the playful is not new to the work of Arthur Mathews, who has had a hand in some of the most enduring and influential British television comedy of all time – not just Father Ted, but also Big Train, Brass Eye and The Fast Show. His fine script is illuminated by sharp direction from Tom Hall, and very, very funny performances from a quality cast.