WITH TWO Bafta nominations for his work on Mrs Brown’s Boys, Dublin comedian/actor Brendan O’Carroll was the big winner yesterday when the nominations for the prestigious UK TV and Film Awards were announced.
O’Carroll has been nominated in the Best Male Performance in a Comedy category and Mrs Brown’s Boys has been nominated in the Best Situation Comedy category.
Despite being roundly criticised by TV critics who find Mrs Brown’s Boys to be clichéd, derivative and offensively stereotypical, O’Carroll’s show about a foul-mouthed Dublin matriarch who delights in interfering in the lives of her children has been a massive ratings success for both RTÉ (which originally screened it) and the BBC.
With a steady three million viewers for each episode on the BBC, Mrs Brown’s Boys has garnered a rare A1 rating on the BBC’s scale of audience appreciation – meaning those who watch it regard it as one of the best sitcoms around.
O’Carroll (57) is enjoying huge acclaim in the UK for his show – an arena-sized tour of the live stage show sold out its entire run last year.
However the success of the show has left many critics – who find his humour outdated and shallow – baffled. O’Carroll himself says “it’s a hate-hate relationship” with the critics.
Mrs Brown’s Boys was never conceived as a cutting-edge, zeitgeist-embracing comedic work. It is mainstream comedy which borrows from old music-hall traditions and features stock, easily recognisable character types. Its “naughtiness” – the occasional lewd allusion etc – is very much of the “saucy seaside postcard” variety.
What distinguishes Mrs Brown’s Boys – and in a sense, makes it a radical work for the BBC – is how far removed it is from the usual hideously middle class BBC sitcom fare (as exemplified by the banal and insipid My Family).
There is a feeling at the BBC that the sitcoms it was making before Mrs Brown’s Boys reflected more on the lives of BBC staff as opposed to those of their viewers. O’Carroll was embraced by the corporation as representing a type of comedy that had been pushed aside by so much trendy, knowing and “ironically correct” fare.
Mrs Brown’s Boys may not be challenging, particularly original or have anything of substance to its material but it makes millions of TV viewers laugh. Viewers who felt marginalised by the corporation’s more experimental style of comedy offering love it.
The critics – especially of the broadsheet variety – will never be won over by O’Carroll’s work, no matter how many Bafta nominations come his way.
Some of the criticisms have been particularly harsh with one reviewer noting that “Mrs Brown’s Boys makes you vaguely embarrassed to be Irish”.
To millions of viewers though, the character of Mrs Brown (who is based on O’Carroll’s own mother – the first female Labour TD elected to the Dáil) is cheeky, funny, rude and entertaining.
Ne’er the twain shall meet.
