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Brown’s Boys would be: poor-taste jokes, sexual innuendo, and hackneyed sitcom tomfoolery that would have felt decades out of date even if I had watched it back in 2011, at first airing.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.
Stacked together alongside the movie, a full watch-through of Mrs Brown’s Boys lasts nearly 24 hours. After two or three, I have thoroughly got the gist, and then some; time seems to slow to a crawl through molasses. The problem isn’t that Mrs Brown’s Boys is witless, or lowbrow – though of course, it is. I remember a recent week in which social media was abuzz with people reminiscing over Harry Hill’s TV Burp, another British comedy show that was often lowbrow, and thoroughly silly. But there’s a reason TV Burp still inspires fondness, while Mrs Brown’s Boys provokes only scorn. It may be a matter of performance as much as material: that intangible quality of simply being funny.
O’Carroll’s show is also thoroughly politically incorrect, but seldom likely to offend. Agnes’s gay son Rory (Rory Cowan) is the source of plenty of antiquated homophobic wordplay, yet the show’s tack is one of ostensible open-mindedness. It would have been easy to make Mrs Brown a kind of bigoted boomer; instead the show makes her benignly out-of-touch. (Off-screen is another matter: the sitcom was embroiled in a controversy earlier this year when O’Carroll was caught making a racist joke on set. “We would also like to clarify that the ‘n’ word was absolutely not spoken, it was implied,” he said in a statement.) It is, incidentally, remarkable too just how straight the series’ sensibility seems, given it revolves around a man in drag.
Several jokes in Mrs Brown’s Boys are the same ones that have been done brilliantly elsewhere. A joke in which the ever-oblivious Mrs Brown searches for the “any key” on a laptop is ripped almost verbatim from an episode of The Simpsons; an argument over a misprint in a board game quiz – the insistence on the answer being “Silence of the Limbs” – plays out like a less-funny repeat of a classic Seinfeld scene. When O’Carroll does them, they’re not only less original – but also laboured and artless in the delivery.
One particularly execrable episode attempts to derive most of its humour from an inflatable pair of breasts. As the breasts deflate, they make the sound of flatulence. As a heartfelt scene plays out, Agnes’s daughter Cathy (Jennifer Gibney, Carroll’s real-world wife) is repeatedly interrupted by the farting sound – again, and again, and again. Every gag is milked dry; subtlety is a foreign word. I’m pretty sure I’ve not laughed out loud once.
The show’s one point of innovation – to give credit where credit is due – revolves around the breaking of the fourth wall. Bloopers are frequently left in the final cut of the show. O’Carroll frequently acknowledges to the audience (both at home and those rabid enthusiasts in the studio crowd) the artifice of the sitcom. (“Why are you here?” “It’s in the script!”) These are sometimes funny, and unexpected, but it’s a case of diminishing returns.
I reach the year 2013, the end of the third season, and this is where things change: for the next nine years, Mrs Brown’s Boys became an annual infliction, abandoning the full-series format entirely. This sense of event probably helped the show’s ratings – the 2013 festive specials drew a series-high audience of 11.4 million people (!!?), which gradually tapered off to 4.18 a decade later. In 2014, O’Carroll also released Mrs Brown’s Boys D’Movie, a theatrically released spin-off that was even worse than the series, if only because it was three times as long as a regular episode. I watch it and take a long, sad shower, cradling myself on the floor like Eva Green in Casino Royale.
I can, at least, see the light at the end of the tunnel: golden, Agnes Brown-less days ahead of me. I sit down and blast through the decade of Christmas episodes in one sitting, then the four-episode 2023 series. What’s interesting about Mrs Brown’s Boys’s switch from weekly serialised runs to twice-yearly seasonal specials is that it loses any real sense of continuity: any notion that the audience is actually invested in things such as character arcs, or story, is thrown out the window. What results is a sense of inertia. Over nearly 15 years, it’s odd just how little the series has changed at all. Recurring jokes, such as Mrs Brown’s son Dermot (Paddy Houlihan) showing up in a preposterous costume (the latest Christmas special sees him outfitted as a container for stool softener), are the kind of short-shelf-life shtick that would surely have been retired were the show airing week-in, week-out.
Finally, I arrive at the end of the marathon, poorer, sadder and dare I say a worse person for it. But I can’t help but feel some sympathy with those who watch the show religiously. I’m not sure Mrs Brown’s Boys really is the worst TV show around. I’m not even sure it’s the worst thing to have blighted BBC One this year. It’s a convenient whipping boy because it is naff and unapologetic in its crudity. But in the end, isn’t there something charming about its brazenness, its readiness to embrace television tradition, to remain utterly immune to its many haters? Is it even, dare I ask, quite watchable?
No – it isn’t. Sleep deprivation got the better of me for a second there. Having slogged my way through screeners for this year’s two specials, I’m now turning my TV off, and possibly fly-tipping it onto the street, just to make sure I don’t accidentally see another minute of “Old Mammy” and her excruciating sons. With no apparent need or desire to change, Mrs Brown’s Boys could easily run for another 15 years. All I know is I won’t be feckin’ watching.
‘Mrs Brown’s Boys’ is available to stream on BBC iPlayer
