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.
So we’re already in questionable territory, if you’ll pardon the expression, and then, I’m sorry to report, they just go deeper. The euphemisms used by the old ladies are ridiculously contrived. “Ladygarden” is the one favoured by Winnie, as advised by her mother when she was a young girl. Scarcely more credible is Birdie’s “meow meow”, not least because its common usage is to do with a street drug rather than pudenda. Even so, the very mention draws a huge “aaaahhhh” of sentimentality from the audience, as if the old girl had just announced that her lonely vulva was to star in next year’s John Lewis Christmas ad campaign. By the end of this bit we find that the sole purpose of this bleak absurdity is to tee up a punchline from Mammy herself. Ready? OK. It goes like this: “I used to call it ‘St Bridget’s Purse’. Then I had Dermot and I changed it to ‘St Patrick’s haversack’.” Even if this is a bloke in a dress, or especially if it’s a bloke in a dress, this is just weird.
The runner-up for lamest attempt at humour in this laugh-free extravaganza is the running joke about grandad (Dermot O’Neill) getting a VR headset for Christmas, which, all too predictably, climaxes with him on the kitchen table air-humping a raw turkey, and then falling over (unconvincingly), like you do when performing virtual sexual intercourse in front of your family. It is further proof that, as well as puns, sight gags, double entendres and irony, O’Carroll and his gang can’t manage to make even a bit of simple slapstick vaguely comical.
If you’re of a certain age, Mrs Brown’s Boys makes one nostalgic for the craft that went into the gently smut-laden Benny Hill Show, albeit sometimes misguidedly. Or even has you pining for the honest, if depressingly flat-footed, efforts of the Little and Large Tellyshow. It feels a much less well-assembled affair than its antecedents in the 1970s.
So it’s badder than bad, worse than ever in fact, weaker than the childish riddles that fall out of a cracker. I happily concede that it still pulls a decent enough audience in to qualify for the Christmas Day (and New Year’s Day) BBC One schedule, even if it’s broadcast at around the time most people are safely unconscious. I don’t blame folk for watching it – each to their own and all that. I do, however, wonder why the BBC is still buying it with our money, and why O’Carroll and his collaborators’ scripts are still so lazy, this time with scarcely an attempt at a storyline, and the actors so poor. Bunch of meow meows, the lot of them.
