Few shows on TV are more hated than Mrs Brown’s Boys.
The nation’s most controversial ‘Mammy’, Agnes Brown, has been gracing our screens for 14 years now, but not much has changed. Not the cast, not the ridiculous plot lines, and not the thousands of people charging to social media to demand the show’s immediate cancellation.
And I’m just going to say it – it doesn’t deserve the hate. I think it’s great and I’m fed up of people looking down their noses at it.
When it returned for a new series on Friday, there was an instant barrage of disparaging comments about the new episode. Metro reported that someone took to X to call the show’s 1.5million viewers ‘lunatics’.
Putting aside the question of why somebody has nothing better to do than critcise strangers on a Friday night, I don’t understand why so many people get so vexed by a sitcom.
Of course, Mrs Brown doesn’t have the witty one liners of Lee Mack’s Not Going Out, or the high profile cast and will-they-won’t-they jeopardy of Gavin and Stacey. The scripts aren’t as sharp, the plots as evocative, or the characters as well developed as other major comedies.
But fundamentally, if you like the show, it’s because you find an old bloke dressing up as an even older, foul-mouthed woman amusing. And many people do – Mrs Brown would have been given the boot long ago if people weren’t watching.
It’s obviously fallen a long way from its heyday, when nearly 12 million people watched the Christmas Day special in 2012, but in an age where more TV sitcoms are going under than staying afloat, Mrs Brown’s Boys is bobbing along just fine.
It’s not just the TV series, either. There’s also the movie, the numerous international theatre tours, and a primetime Saturday night chat show; Mrs Brown’s Boys is one of the few rising tides lifting what’s left of TV comedy’s other ships. It’s not particularly clever, but it is funny.
So why don’t the series’ critics like it? And what enrages them so much that they feel the need to mock its viewers at every opportunity?
For me, both questions have the same answer: snobbery.
In a world of glossy Netflix dramas, beautifully produced documentaries, and confected reality TV shows, the sitcom is raucous, authentic, and unashamedly crude.
Many say this is why the show belongs in a different age. And maybe there’s some truth in that; we’re no longer a nation of potty mouthed market traders, hairdressers, priests, and barmaids pottering around the corner to our mum’s houses for a cuppa like Mrs Brown’s children do.
There’s also the inexcusable comments of the show’s founder and the actor behind Mrs Brown – Brendan O’Carroll – who apologised during filming last year after making a ‘clumsy attempt at a joke’ where a ‘racial term was implied’.
I don’t care how clumsy or implied, this should never have happened.
Scandal aside, the show has a common touch and an affinity with viewers that is so rare in TV. It would be a shame to lose one of the only programmes left that accurately feels the pulse of working class life and brings it to the small screen in such an unvarnished way.
It’s everyday folks, the people who don’t feel the need to broadcast their views about TV all over social media, who made the show so popular, and who see fragments of their own lives within it. What right do social media snipers have to take that away from them?
I’ve always seen a lot of my own family in the Browns. The constant living on top of each other, the gossiping and petty squabbling, but with the underlying knowledge that we’ll always have each other’s backs, however many silly rows we have.
Perhaps that’s the reason it’s one of the few shows all three generations of my family will sit down and watch together.
It can’t just have been my family – the viewing figures speak for themselves – which is why the snobbery around the sitcom is so jarring.
The show’s premise might be silly, and the jokes cheap, but O’Carroll’s humour doesn’t punch down in the nasty way that I believe shows like Little Britain have previously done.
You can find Mrs Brown’s Boys unfunny, but it’s hard to deny that it has bucketloads of heart. If you don’t like it, it’s probably not for you, and that’s fine.
As Mrs Brown would say, you’re welcome to feck off and watch something else.
Do you have a story you’d like to share? Get in touch by emailing jess.austin@metro.co.uk.
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