For professional and other reasons (and I stress not exactly willingly), I’ve had to watch a fair amount of Mrs Brown’s Boys over its inexplicably long presence on our screens. Often, I have felt very much like the character played by Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange. If you recall the scene, the criminal, Alex, undergoes experimental compulsory aversion therapy to cure his violence. He is strapped to a chair, his eyelids forced open with metal clamps, so that he has to observe footage of the most appalling depravity, and is left screaming in agony, mentally scarred for life.
Anyway, back to the show. As I say, it’s always painful viewing, but the 2025 Christmas special plummets some way beneath the usual low standard to reach fresh, unimaginable depths of unfunniness. There’s one excruciating sequence in particular that has burned itself into my consciousness. This is when Mammy (Brendan O’Carroll, the progenitor of the comedy) is in the pub with her cronies Winnie McGoogan (Eilish O’Carroll) and Birdie Flanagan (June Rogers), and the conversation turns from Winnie buying an oddly fragranced Gwyneth Paltrow candle to… yes indeed, their own vintage vaginas.
