Celebrate with Mammy!

Brendan O’Carroll tells TV Times why this festive season needs Agnes Brown more than ever…

- Elaine Reilly & Rebecca Fletcher

Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without a good old knees-up at Mammy Brown’s. So deck the halls, raise your cuppas and brace yourself for more mayhem and mirth as Mrs. Brown’s Boys returns to BBC1 for two cracking seasonal episodes.

Clearly, a global pandemic isn’t going to stop the irrepressible Agnes (played by the show’s creator Brendan O’Carroll) from celebrating. Although behind the scenes there have been some big changes in response to COVID – there are no celebrity guest stars or big live audience – the script is still as near the knuckle as ever.

‘I can’t believe what I get away with,’ grins Brendan, 65, when TV Times calls him at his home in Florida for an exclusive interview about how his cast of real-life family members has pulled off a Christmas miracle.

Here, Brendan – whose other show All Round to Mrs Brown’s was recently voted Favourite Comedy in our annual TV Times Awards – tells us why he hopes the specials get us ho-ho-hoing…

Hurrah! We were worried there might not be a seasonal visit to the Brown house this year…

So were we! I began writing it, thinking, ‘Well, if there’s a lockdown, we’ll do this… if there’s an audience, we’ll do that…’ and then thought it made no sense! So I wrote the two episodes as if everything was normal and two weeks before filming, I looked at the restrictions and changed the episodes as required.

We’re guessing you couldn’t leave out mention of the virus…