You may remember the story a few months ago that Brendan O’Carroll, the actor who created and plays the eponymous matriarch Agnes in Mrs Brown’s Boys, had to apologise for making a “clumsy” joke where “a racial term was implied” during rehearsals for the Christmas special. It must have been a very, very heavy-handed gag indeed, given that the show’s “broad” humour makes Prince Andrew’s attempts to prove he’s a useful member of society seem positively deft. The “incident” with all its undisclosed fearful implications, raised hopes among some of us that the show might finally be put out of its misery, which is to say the misery it inflicts on this particular viewer every feckin’ Christmas, if I may be so, well, clumsy in my language.
No such luck. Like the brief autumn blossoming of the Kamala Harris campaign, it was not to be. So here we are again with the same old formula, the same old characters and the familiar complete and total absence of wit, which is doubly depressing when you consider the Irish invented blarney and are rightly famed for their craic. Yet again, there’s the grim inevitability of a Christmas tree blowing up. Yet again, there’s some unacceptably dull scatological humour, this year with friend of the Brown family Buster (Danny O’Carroll, son of Brendan as it happens), dressed in a poo emoji costume because he’s a human advertising stunt for constipation medicine. That’s right. That random. A poo emoji, but with Buster, inexplicably, also wearing a joke shop Groucho Marx disguise. “Clumsy” doesn’t really do such a set-up justice and, unpromising as it was anyway, no more is heard of it for the entire show.
