I wouldn’t want to sound all conspiratorial, like Nadine Dorries or something, but I have a theory that somewhere deep inside the British Broadcasting Corporation is a powerful and deeply evil Dr No figure, planted there by shadowy forces. His or her mission? To destroy the BBC from within by way of manipulation, making programmes of such appalling worthlessness that the public eventually lose patience and rise up. What’s more, like all the best villains, they work in plain sight. I refer, of course, to whoever is behind the annual agony that is the Mrs Brown’s Boys Christmas Special – broadcast on the holiest day of the television year. Where once the Christmas Day schedules were sanctified by The Morecambe and Wise Show and Mike Yarwood, well, now we have this lazy excuse for entertainment.
I hesitate to cast my mind back to the many (too many) of these specials I’ve reviewed over the years, but I think the 2023 edition is among the worst. It is as if Brendan O’Carroll, the creator of this monstrous “mammy”, was so complacent he couldn’t even be bothered to phone it in this time, and just fed some old scripts and half-arsed storylines into an AI script generator, and sent the product off to our Dr No at the BBC without bothering to read it. As Mrs Brown herself might put it, it would seem that he “doesn’t give a feck” anymore, if he ever did.
