Over the past few years, a new Christmas ritual has entered my life. I find it easily the most irksome of them all, far outstripping cranberry sauce (I mean, what’s it even doing) and Whamageddon. I refer, of course, to the duty that falls to me to review Mrs Brown’s Boys, which never fails to disappointment me in its abject poverty of ambition.
But this year, in honour of the recently departed Victor Lewis-Smith, the brilliant satirist and the finest television critic of our times, I thought I’d try to give Mrs Brown’s Boys a bit of a reappraisal. Lewis-Smith, you may recall, was not only a rare blend of the eloquent, the profane and the downright vicious, but an original thinker, and his take on Mrs Brown’s Boys lay far outside the consensus. He praised it because, in his words, every scene in the “unashamedly Rabelaisian comedy ... brimmed over with so much innocent joy it’s hard to fathom why critics have accused the show of misogyny, homophobia, and even racism”.
