An ode to Mrs Brown’s Boys

‘A mother hen watching all her chicks, a sassy old lady full of tricks’. Mrs Brown’s Boys recently returned to BBC One for yet more festive specials. Astonishingly the last actual full series of non-seasonal episodes was transmitted ten years ago, though a new one is imminent. This Christmas’s were, reassuringly, exactly the same as they always have been.

In this case, ‘always’ goes back a long way. Although it only surfaced on the BBC in 2011, the ‘franchise’ – as we are now expected to call TV programmes, as if they were concessions for burger vans – originated in the mind of Brendan O’Caroll in 1992. But I think Mrs Brown and her incredibly unfashionable and incredibly popular brand of humour goes back a lot, lot further even than that.

2011 itself seems a long time ago now. The very idea of a new live audience, studio-recorded sitcom revolving around an extremely provincial, entirely white working-class family led by a man in old fashioned panto-style drag making it on to the BBC was surprising in 2011.