Brendan O’Carroll: How Dubliner found UK public’s funnybone

Brendan O'Carroll was in fine form yesterday on hearing the news that his ratings-topping series Mrs Brown's Boys has been voted Best Sitcom of the 21st Century by Radio Times readers.

"It vindicates the fans' belief in the show," he told the magazine. "They have kept us on the air – it certainly wasn't the reviewers. There is an audience out there that comedy forgot – that Are You Being Served? audience has been left behind. Us winning this award proves that."

For anyone under 40, Are You Being Served?, which ran for 10 series from 1972, was set in the gentlemen's and ladies' clothing department of a fictional London department store. Its double entendres and sexual stereotypes made the Carry On films look like Ken Loach. And yes, it was hugely popular.

O’Carroll deserves nothing but admiration for the tenacity with which he has taken a simple concept from the Dublin stage to international screens with such success. His version of how it all happened is a little over-simplistic, though.

"Reviled by critics, loved by real people" may have become Mrs Brown's Boys' badge of pride, but do reviewers really keep shows on the air these days? Back in the so-called golden age of British television, or so this version of the story goes, a rich seam of earthy, no-nonsense comedy was mined for enormously popular sitcoms such as Are You Being Served? and Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em.

Highly popular

Rooted in an authentically working-class British comedic tradition – that went back to music hall routines featuring men dressed as women, and women dressed in very little – this seemingly inexhaustible supply line of highly popular entertainment came grinding to a halt in the 1980s.

Humourless bearded ideologues had dared to point out that there was something creepy about middle-aged men chasing scantily-clad young women up and down piers, and that it wasn’t particularly funny in the first place.

Before you could say “Mrs Slocombe’s Pussy”, the whole comedy game had been taken over by Smiths fans with media studies degrees who wanted to “deconstruct” the form – whatever the hell that meant.

It took a man from Finglas in a housecoat and rollers to roll back the clock and give the audience what it actually wanted.

It's an attractive proposition, although not fully borne out by the facts. In a similar poll held in 2004, Yes, Minister, Blackadder and Only Fools and Horses – all products of the benighted, politically correct 1980s – topped viewers' lists. Are You Being Served? came 20th. Even back in its 1970s heyday, Dad's Army and Porridge outranked the goings-on among the haberdashery in Grace's department store.

But O’Carroll does have a point. The 21st century has seen comedy veer off in new directions, not all of them fruitful.

In many cases, traditional sitcom staging (three-sided set, multiple cameras, shot in front of a live audience) has been supplanted by mockumentaries, a la The Office (No 2 in this latest list) or by comedy dramas shot on location. The old format is also in decline in its birthplace, the US.

The sitcom was losing its connection to the early days of live television (and, through that, to the popular theatre from which it sprang).

So why did it take a Dubliner to revive this venerable genre and locate the missing funnybone of the great British public? And why does nobody across the water seem to be able to emulate the feat?

Struggle

One answer may be that Ireland is not a very hospitable place for comedians, and so they have to fight harder, fail more frequently and struggle their way through more adversity to achieve their objective.

The evolutionary traces of Agnes Brown’s progress from radio sketch to movie star (the implausible Anjelica Huston) to centre of a touring theatre troupe to ratings-topping show have all left their mark.

The result is a product that brings TV entertainment back to the rough-and-tumble of its early years, with the live audience an indispensable part of proceedings.

O’Carroll’s particular variety of Dublinese also helps. Salty language and a willingness to be sentimental to the point of corniness might not travel as well across the UK if the setting was Newcastle or Birmingham.

Not for the first time, Irishness allows the English to enjoy themselves in ways that would not otherwise be permitted.

By any standards, it’s a remarkable success story, and one which shows no signs of abating.