Luckily, Brendan O’Carroll’s show is broadcast at around the time most people are safely unconscious
For professional reasons—and very much not by choice—I’ve been subjected to a considerable amount of Mrs Brown’s Boys during its bafflingly long run on television. More than once, the experience has left me identifying with the character played by Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange. You’ll remember the scene: the delinquent Alex is forced to endure an experimental aversion therapy, strapped helplessly to a chair, eyelids prised open with metal clamps, compelled to watch scenes of unspeakable degradation. He emerges howling in pain, traumatised beyond repair—a comparison that feels, after prolonged exposure, uncomfortably apt.
Anyway, back to the programme itself. It’s rarely anything other than an ordeal, but the 2025 Christmas special manages to sink even below its customary nadir, discovering startling new levels of humourlessness. One particularly punishing sequence has seared itself into my memory. It unfolds in the pub, where Mammy—played by Brendan O’Carroll, the show’s chief architect—is holding court with her loyal companions Winnie McGoogan (Eilish O’Carroll) and Birdie Flanagan (June Rogers). What begins with a discussion of Winnie’s purchase of a strangely scented candle from Gwyneth Paltrow’s lifestyle empire soon takes a grim detour into—yes—the supposed comic potential of their own ageing anatomy.
So we’re already straying into dubious territory—if you’ll forgive the phrase—and then, regrettably, things deteriorate further. The euphemisms deployed by the elderly trio are laughably forced. Winnie favours “ladygarden”, apparently a term passed down from her mother in childhood. Birdie’s contribution, “meow meow”, is scarcely more convincing, particularly given its more familiar association with a street drug than with anatomy. Nonetheless, its mere utterance prompts a prolonged, misty-eyed “aaaahhhh” from the studio audience, as though Birdie had just revealed that her long-neglected vulva was about to headline next year’s John Lewis Christmas advertising campaign.
All of this joyless nonsense exists solely to set up a punchline from Mammy herself—played, of course, by Brendan O’Carroll. Brace yourself. Here it is: “I used to call it ‘St Bridget’s Purse’. Then I had Dermot and I changed it to ‘St Patrick’s haversack’.” Whether it’s a man in a dress—or perhaps especially because it’s a man in a dress—the result isn’t subversive or daring. It’s simply, profoundly odd.
The silver medal for feeblest gag in this joyless pageant goes to the running joke about Grandad (Dermot O’Neill) receiving a VR headset for Christmas. The punchline arrives with numbing inevitability: he ends up on the kitchen table, miming intimacy with a raw turkey before toppling over—apparently the natural consequence of simulated romance performed in full view of one’s family. The sequence merely underlines that, alongside puns, sight gags, double entendres and irony, Brendan O’Carroll and company can’t coax even the most basic slapstick into something resembling a laugh.
For viewers of a certain vintage, the show induces an odd nostalgia for the craft—however occasionally misjudged—of the gently smutty The Benny Hill Show, or even for the earnest if leaden efforts of The Little and Large Tellyshow. By comparison, this feels shabbier and more haphazard than its 1970s forebears. It is bad in a way that goes beyond mere incompetence: worse than ever, flimsier than the groaners found inside a Christmas cracker.
I’ll readily concede that it still attracts a large enough audience to justify a Christmas Day (and New Year’s Day) slot on BBC One—even if it airs at an hour when most people are sensibly unconscious. I don’t begrudge anyone their viewing choices; to each their own. What I do question is why the BBC continues to fund it with public money, why the scripts remain so slapdash—this time barely bothering with a storyline at all—and why the performances are so uniformly poor. A sorry bunch, the lot of them.
