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”.
That was some years ago, to be fair, and in the interim the sitcom has become far more woke than ever it was. This, to my mind, is a welcome thing, and doesn’t detract from what Brendan O’Carroll’s creation Agnes Loretta Brown is all about – smut, innuendo, self-consciously bad jokes, and a blithe deconstruction of television norms, which involves keeping the bloopers in, ad-libbing, and routinely breaking the fourth wall. As Lewis-Smith observed with, for him, rare hyperbole, Mrs Brown’s Boys does have a certain Brechtian quality.
It’s still not very funny, though. In the spirit of Christmas, I’ll grant O’Carroll some credit for an especially shrewd bit of dialogue between Mammy and her grandson, Bono (Jamie O’Carroll), a typical disciple of Greta Thunberg (“Greta Thornbird” to Mammy). When the lad accuses Mrs B and “your generation” of being responsible for climate change, Mammy reminds him that in her day, people drank water from the tap, not plastic containers; that their pop bottles were constantly reused; and that they dried their washing through “solar and wind power”, ie on the line rather than in some supercharged electric dryer.
The plot this year is also a bit more original than usual, if bizarre. Unlucky-in-love middle-aged daughter Cathy (Jennifer Gibney, who is the real-life wife of Brendan O’Carroll) has started dating a strange, even sinister Englishman, who Agnes’s chum Winnie McGoogan (Eilish O’Carroll) thinks “might be a vampire”. Indeed, he does have an odd way about him, what with liking horror movies and having a couple of creepy kids in tow, though quite why they chose an Englishman named “Boris” with oodles of superficial charm to be the epitome of deceitful diabolical evil is, of course, anyone’s guess.
Cathy’s new chap certainly puts the willies up Agnes, if I can use the kind of line the show’s creator might deploy. Boris is played by the always excellent Phil Cornwell, with a menacing subtlety rarely glimpsed in Mrs Brown’s Boys, and I’m actually looking forward to finding out more about this mysterious character in the New Year’s Day edition. And that’s not something I thought I’d ever say about Mrs Brown’s Boys.
Still, I didn’t laugh that much, and the hackneyed sitcom tropes and weak lines just don’t work for me, even with a strong dose of Christmas cheer taken. Here, for example – just you try laughing at this exchange:
Buster: “It’s a magic Christmas tree.”
Mammy: “Really? A magic Christmas tree?”
Buster: “Yeah. You know what that means?”
Mammy: “Yeah. It was stolen from a magician.”
And that’s the kind of offal the show overwhelmingly comprises. It’s not snobbish to point out that it doesn’t make sense, even at a surreal level. The slapstick is better, the highlight being Agnes riding Grandad like Seabiscuit, which needs no further elaboration, I trust.
Incredulous and stony-faced, I’ve watched people weep with laughter at Mrs Brown’s Boys, and I can’t dispute its extreme and incredibly durable popularity (it started on the radio 30 years ago and has been a Christmas TV staple since 2012). It has successfully defied the critics, and it won over the acerbic and fastidious Lewis-Smith, which is quite the achievement and one to take seriously. I’ve made an effort to like it, I really have, and this year’s is better than most. I’ve given it another star this time round – but that’s the lot. Sorry, Victor.
