{"id":369864,"date":"2025-12-26T11:01:10","date_gmt":"2025-12-26T11:01:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/369864\/"},"modified":"2025-12-26T11:01:10","modified_gmt":"2025-12-26T11:01:10","slug":"mrs-browns-boys-christmas-special-review-excruciating-sitcom-plummets-to-unimaginable-new-depths","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/369864\/","title":{"rendered":"Mrs Brown\u2019s Boys Christmas Special review \u2013 Excruciating sitcom plummets to unimaginable new depths"},"content":{"rendered":"

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For professional and other reasons (and I stress not exactly willingly), I\u2019ve had to watch a fair amount of Mrs Brown\u2019s Boys <\/a>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. <\/p>\n

Anyway, back to the show. As I say, it\u2019s always painful viewing<\/a>, but the 2025 Christmas special plummets some way beneath the usual low standard to reach fresh, unimaginable depths of unfunniness. There\u2019s one excruciating sequence in particular that has burned itself into my consciousness. This is when Mammy (Brendan O\u2019Carroll, the progenitor of the comedy) is in the pub with her cronies Winnie McGoogan (Eilish O\u2019Carroll) and Birdie Flanagan (June Rogers), and the conversation turns from Winnie buying an oddly fragranced Gwyneth Paltrow candle to\u2026 yes indeed, their own vintage vaginas. <\/p>\n

So we\u2019re already in questionable territory, if you\u2019ll pardon the expression, and then, I\u2019m sorry to report, they just go deeper. The euphemisms used by the old ladies are ridiculously contrived. \u201cLadygarden\u201d is the one favoured by Winnie, as advised by her mother when she was a young girl. Scarcely more credible is Birdie\u2019s \u201cmeow meow\u201d, not least because its common usage is to do with a street drug rather than pudenda. Even so, the very mention draws a huge \u201caaaahhhh\u201d of sentimentality from the audience, as if the old girl had just announced that her lonely vulva was to star in next year\u2019s 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: \u201cI used to call it \u2018St Bridget\u2019s Purse\u2019. Then I had Dermot and I changed it to \u2018St Patrick\u2019s haversack\u2019.\u201d Even if this is a bloke in a dress, or especially if it\u2019s a bloke in a dress, this is just weird.<\/p>\n

\"AgnesAgnes is back (BBC Studios \/ BOC \/ Graeme Hunter)<\/p>\n

The runner-up for lamest attempt at humour in this laugh-free extravaganza is the running joke about grandad (Dermot O\u2019Neill) 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\u2019Carroll and his gang can\u2019t manage to make even a bit of simple slapstick vaguely comical. <\/p>\n

If you\u2019re of a certain age, Mrs Brown\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n

So it\u2019s 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\u2019s Day) BBC One schedule, even if it\u2019s broadcast at around the time most people are safely unconscious. I don\u2019t blame folk for watching it \u2013 each to their own and all that. I do, however, wonder why the BBC is still buying it with our money, and why O\u2019Carroll and his collaborators\u2019 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. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Your support helps us to tell the story From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":369865,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[49,48,75,348],"class_list":["post-369864","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tv","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment","tag-tv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/369864","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=369864"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/369864\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/369865"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=369864"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=369864"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=369864"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}