Is Mrs Brown’s Boys really that bad? Until last week, I had never seen more than a minute of Brendan O’Carroll’s infamous BBC sitcom – but knew it, of course, by reputation. The series, which sees Irish comedian O’Carroll don a dress and fusty perm to play eccentric matriarch Agnes Brown, has often been referred to as the worst show on British television – a crass, unfunny throwback that for some reason keeps returning, every Christmas, as if hand-delivered by the Grinch himself. My curiosity was piqued, however. Surely, I thought, reports of its mythological awfulness must be somewhat overstated. So I decided to see for myself. I give myself a week, and set out to fill every unclaimed minute of my time with a front-to-back Mrs Brown’s marathon.
The regret is almost immediate. The first episode plays out pretty much exactly how I had always imagined an episode of Mrs Brown’s Boys would be: poor-taste jokes, sexual innuendo, and hackneyed sitcom tomfoolery that would have felt decades out of date even if I had watched it back in 2011, at first airing. The next episode was much the same. And the next. And the next. There’s very little variation between the episodes, which take place almost entirely within three sets: Agnes Brown’s kitchen, Agnes Brown’s living room, and Agnes Brown’s local pub. The supporting cast – Agnes Brown’s sons, daughter, father-in-law and a few other hangers-on – is comprised largely of O’Carroll’s friends and relatives. Plotlines typically see the cantankerous, out-of-touch Mrs Brown intervene in her children’s lives or romances; it is a sitcom in which Mrs Brown is always herself the situation.
