The Mrs Brown’s Boys Christmas special is a crime against comedy
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.
Why go to the trouble of introducing a man as a poo emoji – it does possess humorous potential – only for the human turd never to be glimpsed again? Why, more generally, are the gags in dialogue so contrived and so lame, as if they fell out of a Christmas cracker, eg: “If money doesn’t grow on trees, why do banks have branches?”
Routinely, comedic elements are rolled into motion, albeit fumblingly, and then just left to roll around for a bit on set, unresolved and making no sense. If Agnes Brown really wants to “gobble Dr Flynn” – the punchline, obviously, to a line about the turkey – why does she spend the rest of the episode avoiding his lascivious advances? If there is to be some dramatic tension about Grandad (Dermot O’Neill, hardly making an effort here) copping off with Birdie (a nicely saucy June Rodgers), why so carelessly destroy the mystery so soon? I presume that only Ofcom and the Online Safety Act prevented a full-on porno scene for Christmas night, to remove any remaining doubts in the audience about the nature of the Grandad-Birdie dalliance.
Most grievous of all there’s the usual schmaltzy storyline, disconnected from anything else, on this occasion featuring Agne’s daughter, Cathy (Jennifer Gibney, real-life wife to Brendan), organising a Christmas meal for 100 of Dublin’s homeless. Susie Blake plays the archetypal snobby English home counties lady, Mrs Nicholson, a Brown family in-law, who tries to sabotage the charitable endeavour. Mrs Nicholson would actually be quite an interesting character if she was drawn as a truly imperious sadistic allegory for Britain’s 800-year occupation of the island of Ireland, a real Cruella, and something Blake is well capable of portraying with appropriate iciness; but it turns out Mrs Nicholson has a disappointingly warm heart after all, and redeems herself with the donation of a gigantic turkey for the slap-up supper. It’s like Oliver Cromwell having second thoughts about massacring all of Ireland’s monks and priests, and then converting to the one holy Catholic and apostolic church as an act of penance.
The traditional Mrs Brown musical section is, as ever, so saccharine it could induce type 2 diabetes. And if that doesn’t bring your dinner up, there’s the final crime against comedy, Agnes’s superfluous, sanctimonious, closing monologue, a kind of moral bludgeoning just in case you survived this far.
It’s worth saying, as I find myself having to write every year about O’Carroll’s undeniably popular creation, that coarse, scatological, filthy, jokes in poor taste have an honourable role to play in the ecosystem of comedy – provided they are actually funny. However, that is where Brendan O’Carroll’s formulaic, lazy, constipated creation invariably gets stuck. It’s as stale as a particularly recalcitrant Boxing Day stool, and considerably less fun.
