
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
