Ask me Bafta

Brendan O'Carroll's comedy, with its dirty jokes and malapropisms, might not be the critics' choice, but his appeal to the taste for smut in Ireland and Britain has made him, and 'Mrs Brown', only massive, writes STEPHEN DIXON

HOW MANY PEOPLE – let’s rephrase that: how many Irish Times readers – do you know who would admit to liking Brendan O’Carroll? Yet his plays pack Ireland’s biggest theatres, and his Mrs Brown’s Boys special was the most-watched show on RTÉ last Christmas, with 880,000 – half of all viewers – tuning in. He taps into a predilection for smut here that lies mostly submerged, and now, particularly after his Bafta win last weekend, he has triumphed in Britain, where an enthusiasm for the robust joke is more openly acknowledged.

Something that struck me when I moved to Ireland from Britain was the scarcity of ribald jokes, invariably used in Britain’s more buttoned-up society to lubricate social interaction. There they are common currency in pubs and gatherings to break the ice: “Here, have you heard this one?” In Ireland, pub discourses often feature sex, of course, or matters scatological, but tend to take the form of very funny rambling monologues or witty off-the-cuff rejoinders rather than the structured set-up, build-up and punchline of the British dirty joke.

Our comic exports to Britain – Dara Ó Briain, say, or Ed Byrne – can be trusted to enliven the direst panel show with spontaneous wit. Graham Norton is a ubiquitous presence. New scripts by Graham Linehan and Sharon Horgan are gratefully fallen on. Sightings of Dylan Moran are always welcome. Father Ted is repeated endlessly.

But the big success story of the past few years, in terms of Irish comedy in Britain, belongs to O’Carroll, an entertainer whose existence barely registers with some sections of Irish society. He didn’t need last weekend’s Bafta award for best TV comedy to tell him that he is, in the words of his other self, Mrs Agnes Brown, “only massive”.

His current UK theatre tour has sold out. More than six million people watched the final episode of Mrs Brown’s Boys on BBC One in February – Jonathan Ross’s interview with David Beckham, on ITV at the same time, attracted fewer than four million – and Mrs Brown DVDs sell in huge numbers. A clip from one of the shows, Mrs Brown’s Misunderstanding, has had more than three million hits on YouTube.

Brendan O’Carroll is not a comedian for the critics. He is a comedian for the people. He can be hilarious but never seeks to impress by being too smart, and he has said his intention is to provide belly laughs and make people forget their troubles for a while. Years ago he told me: “My audience expects to come and see me and switch off. I’m the action movie.”

He comes from a solidly working-class Dublin background and is completely unpretentious as a man and as a comedian, his humour being an extension of the jokes told in British pubs rather than the apercus, bon mots and word games of QI, Mock the Week and the catered dinner party.

The Mrs Brown stage and TV shows are constructed in part from the bones of old gags. They contain punchlines from jokes I haven’t heard in years, crammed into arbitrary plot lines borrowed or half-remembered from various sources. In one typical episode echoing scenes from the 1984 Michael Palin movie A Private Function, Mrs Brown overhears her family talking about putting the aged family dog down, or into a home, and naturally assumes they are talking about her. Cue much mugging and falling-about by the foul-mouthed old biddy. (O’Carroll is an excellent mime in the classic slapstick tradition.)

Mrs Brown is a grotesque like Old Mother Riley in the British variety theatres and movies of years gone by; O’Carroll makes no attempt to be at all realistic as a woman beyond wearing a wig and frock, and speaks in something like his normal voice. He also steps aside from the action to address the audience directly, and this can be disarming; it’s hard to groan at a predictable punchline if O’Carroll is staring at you and saying: “You saw that coming, didn’t you?”

The coproduction between BBC Scotland and Bocpix (O’Carroll’s production company) in association with RTÉ is the latest flowering of a character the former stand-up comic devised 20 years ago in a series of ramshackle plays that did huge business around Ireland in the 1990s and in the UK since. There was also a long-running and popular radio series for RTÉ and a movie, Agnes Browne, he wrote in 1999, starring Anjelica Huston.

A key figure in the success of Mrs Brown’s Boys on British television is Stephen McCrum, who saw the stage show in Scotland four years ago and approached O’Carroll with the offer of a series. As producer of the BBC’s Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps and Coming of Age, both rich in working-class sexual and lavatory humour, McCrum is obviously a man with a keen interest in sauciness. Mrs Brown’s Boys, with its malapropisms and gags involving bikini waxes, “organisms”, losing your virginity upstairs on a double-decker bus, rectal thermometers, Viagra (“we give it to Grandad to stop him pissing on his socks”), malfunctioning genitalia and so on, was right up his street.

However, it should be pointed out that many of Mrs Brown’s fans are young people and that, in spite of the late hour Mrs Brown is screened, her quips are often heard in British school playgrounds.

Brendan O’Carroll’s Mensa rating puts him in Ireland’s top 2 per cent. Born in Finglas in 1955, he was one of 11 children. After leaving school at 12, he tried various jobs before becoming an entertainer. Once in the business, he saw the gap in the market for earthy humour. He worked out his stance very carefully. He became hard, and he became brazen: “The audience have to believe that you actually don’t give a f**k,” he told me. “Because if audiences think you care, they nail you. You’ve got to have this attitude: F**k you! If you don’t have that attitude, they’ll eat you. And you have to deliver the attitude with complete conviction, and if you don’t they’ll gobble you. And so they should.”

He has earned his success through doggedness, talent and toughness, and he revels in it: I have seen him take photographs of a packed audience from the stage. He also seemed to have been driven in the early years by a chip on his shoulder, though recent triumphs may have lessened its weight. In the programme notes to the original Mrs Brown Rides Again at the Olympia in 2003, he mentioned a teacher, Mr Muldoon, who told him when he was 10 that he would always be a loser: “If by any chance you are still alive and here tonight, Mr Muldoon . . . ask me b****x!”

O’Carroll, already wealthy, reportedly stands to make millions from Mrs Brown worldwide because of the award. He takes good care of his family – many of them, including his wife, children and in-laws, are part of the Mrs Brown team – and, when he’s not touring or filming, lives a life of sunny luxury in Florida, from where he might figuratively flick two fingers in the direction of Ireland from time to time, now waving his Bafta statuette, and chuckle: “Ask me b*****x, Mr Muldoon, ask me b****x!”