Mrs Brown told to cut the cursing and ditch the family. Her reply: Feck off !
(Needless to say, what she said to TV bosses was much ruder)
IT’s one of TV’s most popular sitcoms but its penchant for foul language and a row over casting nearly put paid to Mrs Brown’s Boys from the outset.
Brendan O’Carroll – the show’s creator, who plays the formidable and potty-mouthed matriarch Mrs Brown – has revealed how he locked horns with Channel 4 bosses who were interested in the show several years before it was made by the BBC.
Channel 4 had insisted that he sack the existing cast – made up of friends and family, who had been performing together for years – but O’Carroll refused to back down, telling the broadcaster: ‘It’s the f ****** cast or it’s f ****** nothing. So it came to nothing.’
O’Carroll went on to tell the crowd at the recent Bafta Scotland event that ITV had also expressed interest in the sitcom but, this time, it was Mrs Brown’s colourful language that killed negotiations.
He said TV executives had reservations about the use of the F word to which the Dublin comedian claims to have said: ‘Well, f*** off!’
‘If I hand in your script all they’ll see is f***’
There was yet another twist in transferring the show from stage to screen, with O’Carroll attributing the delay to the ‘Sachsgate’ scandal involving Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross.
In October 2008, during an episode of BBC radio’s The Russell Brand Show, the pair made a call to actor Andrew Sachs (best known for playing Manuel in Fawlty Towers) and left a series of lewd messages on his answering machine.
Because of the controversy around the language used by the pair, Mrs Brown’s Boys producer Stephen McCrum, delayed pitching the sitcom to the BBC for nine months.
O’Carroll said McCrum told him at the time: ‘If I hand your script in now, all they’re going to see is “f***”.’
Mrs Brown’s Boys was originally performed by O’Carroll and his troupe in Ireland in the early 1990s as a series of stage plays, radio plays, books and straight-to-DVD films.
The TV show is a co-production between RTÉ and BBC Scotland and was first aired on our national broadcaster in January 2011. It was an instant ratings smash, with an average viewership of more than 750,000 for RTÉ.
A second series was quickly commissioned, which began with a Christmas special broadcast on RTÉ on December 25, 2011, and was shown the following day on BBC One. That programme was the most watched show on RTÉ over the Christmas period.
Since then, there have been three series and 12 special editions of the sitcom.
It was also adapted for the big screen in the form of Mrs Brown’s Boys D’Movie, which grossed €27.2m on a budget of €4.2m.
O’Carroll recently launched a spin-off show, All Round To Mrs Brown’s, which features the mother and her extended family inviting celebrity guests to their home in a chat show format. The programme first aired simultaneously at 9.15pm on BBC and RTÉ on Saturday, March 25, and was another huge ratings success for both channels.
The first episode featured Baywatch actress Pamela Anderson, stern tennis mom Judy Murray, musician James Blunt and music mogul Louis Walsh, scoring an audience of 6.93 million for the BBC and 472,000 for RTÉ.
Last week, This Morning hosts Holly Willoughby and Phillip Schofield made their debut on the show.
The pair went down a treat with fans of the show, and Willoughby even joined in at one stage with the risque humour.