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For professional and other reasons (and I emphasize that this is not at all voluntarily), I had to see appropriate amount of Mrs. Brown’s Boys On its inexplicably long presence on our screens. Often, I have felt very much like the character played by Malcolm McDowell A Clockwork Orange. If you missed the scene, the perpetrator, Alex, undergoes experimental compulsory aversion therapy to cure his violence. She is tied to a chair, her eyelids are forced open with metal clamps to subject her to footage of the most horrific depravity, and she is left screaming in agony, psychologically scarred for life.
Anyway, back to the show. As I say, it’s always painful to watchBut the 2025 Christmas special dips a few notches below the usual low standard to reach fresh, unimaginable depths. There is one harrowing sequence in particular that has burned itself into my consciousness. It happens when Mammy (Brendan O’Carroll, a doyen of comedy) is at the pub with her pals Winnie McGugan (Eilish O’Carroll) and Birdie Flanagan (June Rogers), and the conversation starts with Winnie buying a strange-smelling Gwyneth Paltrow candle made of… yes, really, her own old vagina.
So we’re already in questionable territory, if you’ll pardon the expression, and then, I’m sorry to report, they get even deeper. The euphemisms used by older women are ridiculously fabricated. “Ladygarden” is Winnie’s favourite, as advised to her by her mother when she was a little girl. Birdie’s “meow meow” is hardly more reliable, not only because its common use is with a street drug rather than a pudenda. Yet, the very mention of it draws a big “aaaahhh” of emotion from the audience, as if the old girl had just announced that her lonely cunt will be starring in next year’s John Lewis Christmas advertising campaign. By the end of the piece we find that the sole purpose of this dark absurdity is to extract 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 Haversack’.” Even if it’s someone in a costume, or especially if it’s someone in a costume, it’s just weird.
Runner-up for worst attempt at humor in this laugh-free extravaganza is the running joke about Grandpa (Dermot O’Neill) getting a VR headset for Christmas, which is very predictable, culminating with him tossing a raw turkey into the air at the kitchen table, and then (incongruously) falling, as you do when having virtual intercourse in front of your family. This is further proof that, along with the puns, sight gags, double meanings and ironies, O’Carroll and his gang can’t manage to make even the slightest bit of simple slapstick vaguely humorous.
If you are of a certain age, Mrs. Brown’s Boys Makes one nostalgic for a craft that gradually became clogged with dirt benny hill showAlbeit sometimes misguidedly. Or you’re waiting for honest, if disappointingly flat-footed, efforts Small and big teleshow. It seems to be a much less well-organized affair than it was in the 1970s.
So this is the worst of the worst, actually worse than before, even weaker than the childish riddles that come out of a firecracker. I happily admit that it still draws enough viewers to qualify for the Christmas Day (and New Year’s Day) BBC One schedule, even though it airs at a time when most people are safely unconscious. I don’t blame people for seeing this – to each their own and everyone else’s. However, I wonder why the BBC is still buying it with our money, and why the scripts by O’Carroll and his colleagues are still so lazy, with hardly any effort put into the story this time, and the actors so bad. A bunch of meows, lots of them.