Mrs Brown’s Boys Live

BBC iplayer

rs Brown’s Boys is one of the most extraordinary TV phenomena of our time. It’s been the UK’S most popular sitcom for years (its only rival being Miranda, which is over for now), yet it’s often critically derided, built as it is around a pretty basic drag act and jokes that have been around since at least the ’70s. Last weekend, its creator and star Brendan O’carroll took the bold (and totally unnecessary) step of doing a special, one-off live episode right in the middle of the otherwise moribund summer Saturday night BBC1 schedule.

Brave as it is for any scripted show to step out of its comfort zone and go live, this was hardly a technical challenge of Eastenders or Corrie-style proportions. The style of Mrs Brown’s Boys is deliberately ramshackle, anyway, complete with endless “breaking of the fourth wall”,

Mas O’carroll’s tough, no-nonsense Irish matriarch Mrs Brown addresses the audience, refers to and even shows the camera crew, and corpses over his/her lines. Indeed, it’s the show’s tone of mild anarchy and subversive cheekiness that is its primary pleasure. I can totally see why so many millions love Mrs Brown’s schtick: there’s a sense of rebelliousness and daring about her, so she somehow gets away with dropping F-bombs throughout the show, and milking age-old innuendoes for all their vulgar worth, like the “pussy” routine in the live episode, which was like an extended tribute to ’70s sitcom Are You Being Served. Somehow, the lamer the jokes, the more rickety the plot and the more indulgent it all seems, the more the audience laps it up. They love how Mrs Brown is getting away with this stuff. And getting away with it she most certainly is.