The Vicar of Dibley is a BBC television sitcom created by
Richard Curtis and written for actress
Dawn French by Curtis and
Paul Mayhew-Archer, with contributions from
Kit Hesketh-Harvey. It aired from 1994 to 2007.
The Vicar of Dibley was set in a fictional small
Oxfordshire village called Dibley, which is assigned a female
vicar following the 1992 changes in the
Church of England that permitted the
ordination of women. The main character was an invention of Richard Curtis, but he and Dawn French extensively consulted the Revd
Joy Carroll, one of the first female priests, and garnered many character traits and much information.