Mrs Brown's Boys star Brendan O'Carroll's blunt two-word response to show's critics

Since it first appeared on the BBC, some 14 years ago, Mrs Brown's Boys has been a hugely divisive TV show. While audiences, at least at first, loved Brendan O'Carroll's bawdy, seaside postcard humour, critics have slammed the show's "old-fashioned blend of silly voices and slapstick".

The love-it-or hate-it show has won Best Comedy at the viewer-voted National Television Awards a record six times, and Mrs Brown's Boys creator Brendan O'Carroll has little time for his critics.

But O'Carroll himself has little time for the naysayers. He told podcaster Gerry Kelly: "The ones that love me, I love them, and the ones that don't, f*** them."

He added that if people don't care for the show, they should simply "pick up the remote and change the station".

Despite initially drawing in millions with its retro brand of humour, reaching a peak viewership of 11.52 million for its first Christmas Day special in 2013, Mrs Brown's Boys is now in something of a decline.

The show, which begins its fifth season tonight, last featured in the top 10 Christmas Day ratings in 2020, attracting 3.8 million viewers, but ratings have continued to slide. Production on the 2024 Christmas special was temporarily halted after a "racial term was implied" during rehearsals.

Brendan regrets the controversy, but explains that the racism came from the character, and didn't necessarily reflect his own views. "Comedy should offend somebody somewhere," he said. "Otherwise, I'm not doing the job."

He added that, if nothing else, the furore had brought the topic of racial prejudice back into public discourse

"in the situation of Mrs. Brown, she doesn't get a lot of stuff," he said. "The idea of that thing was to poke fun at intergenerational racism, how she didn't get racism.

"And she doesn't, Mrs. Brown doesn't get racism. She doesn't get gay, even though her son is gay, and she now acknowledges that he's gay and accepts it, but she doesn't really know what gay is. There's no idea."

O'Carroll is similarly defensive about the amount of swearing in the show's scripts. Explaining how he was dragged into a meeting about the use of swear words, he said to BBC boss Danny Cohen in 2018: "You want me to stop saying 'f***' so you can put the show on at eight o'clock?' And he said: 'Exactly.'

"I said: 'The show is the show. Put it at eight o'clock, or put it on at half 10, put it on at half 12, the people who want to see it will find it. But the show is the show. I don't care when you put it on, we are not changing the show'."

He added that, as a writer, he will "keep pushing the envelope" and finding new ways to test and shape public opinion.

And if people don't like it, he has two simple words for them.