Friday Night Special: Big School and Mrs Brown’s Boys

As a man who could nominally be considered a “TV critic”; admittedly a hopeless small time, two bit example who plies his trade for no financial benefit from the blogs section of a student newspaper, I decided it might be beneficial to get off my laptop and actually review some programming which is y’know, currently on the television in my own country. A slight deviation from my mission statement perhaps, this blog being justified as a separate entity from the TV section by being a purveyor of the sort of series’ you watch in a box set format, one episode after another on Netflix (or “Netflix” as the case may be, wink, nudge) until you wake up the following day, face down on the keyboard, drooling lightly onto the spacebar. That aside, I thought an attempt at emulating the fine work being done by my contemporaries in the TV review sections of our national newspapers would validate my continued peddling of this crap. So with that in mind I sat down for a Friday evening in front of the box with two bottles of red wine and my mother, who was of course, happily snoring on the sofa by about nine-thirty.

I will admit that I’ve never been a tremendous fan of British television. I love TV as a medium for the escapism and immersion into a slightly nicer, simpler world than the one we inhabit, a form of programming which is mostly the purview of Americans. British TV by contrast is a near constant stream of bleak portrayals of gritty urban life, rose tinted revisionist odes to period history and dark, banal “sitcoms” full of unremittingly unlikable characters. There are several notable exceptions to this otherwise fairly comprehensive rule but broadly, it’s never been for me.

However, I was buoyed to some degree by the latest comedic effort from David Walliams and the Dawson Brothers, Big School (BBC One). Walliams has always been a favorite of mine. His brand of brash, surrealist yet delectably cutting satire puts me in the mind of South Park, a show whose  similarly deceptively, intelligent comedy met much the same criticisms as Walliams’ most famous collaboration, Little Britain, as a show prefaced entirely around swear words and vulgar toilet humour. This is of course, utter rubbish, and it’s a testament to Walliams’ genius that he can combine initial shock gags with deeper layers of observational comedy about modern society.

Big School boasts an all-star cast of British comedic talent including Walliams himself portraying a throwback to the teachers of days past, fiercely proud of what he believes to be his high ranking position as “Deputy Head of Science”. He’s joined by Phillip Glenister as an uber macho PE Teacher, Catherine Tate as a painfully politically correct scion of modern, progressive teaching, and Daniel Rigby as a hopelessly deluded young Music Teacher, acoustic guitar in hand, desperately attempting to get “down with the kids”.

I enjoyed it, despite the fact that school based sitcoms are now the second most worn out concept on British television behind Channel 5’s attempts to eke out the last sub-atomic droplets of innovation from the Big Brother franchise with a molecular sieve. The devilishly wicked sense of humor on display (prime examples being Glenister exclaiming during a debate over room booking times that he “won’t have your drama lot gaying up my sports hall” and a debate between Tate and Walliams over the acceptable term for a Masai tribal warrior “He’s Bla-, Afro-Caribbean, we’ll obvious he’s not Cari-, he’s an Afro….ican”) along with some frighteningly accurate social commentary on the 21st century education system, forgives it a lot of its unoriginality.

So with that, in the space of half an hour I suddenly felt a lot better about British television again, and decided to soldier on for another show before inevitably switching back to E4 and watching four more Big Bang re-runs. What followed was Mrs. Brown’s Boys (BBC One) which my Mother assured me was “very funny”. This, I should have realized in hindsight, was a rather grim portent of what was to follow, with my mother’s sense of humor being basically at the sub fart jokes level, considering things like the resemblance of a cucumber to an erect phallus to be the height of wit.

Mrs. Brown’s Boys is the story of a foul mouthed, elderly Irish widow who runs a fruit and veg stall in Dublin and can be charitably described as ‘feisty’. Mrs. Brown is played by a man, Irish comedian Brendan O’Carroll, who portrays the old dear with the aid of a wig and that face putty they used to make Craig David’s chin on Bo’ Selecta.

Now, if being mentioned in the same sentence as Bo’ Selecta, the earlier brainchild of the man who brought us Keith Lemon wasn’t enough of an indictment for Mrs. Brown’s Boys, I was very much of the impression that we were over this panto dame school of humour by now? Yes, he’s a man pretending to be a woman, poorly, we get it. It’s not funny, not one bit. It’s eerie and faintly grotesque. It’s all a bit like going to the theatre and being shown an authentic, Victorian Freak show. A seedy relic of the past when we didn’t know any better. But we do now, we’ve moved on. You can leave your fake tits and your wig in the mid-1970s, Brendan.

It’s not just that though. Mrs. Brown’s Boys crucially, fatally, just doesn’t have a single joke in it. The main preface for the humour it seems, asides from the cross dressing and the way O’Carroll says “ficking” every four words, comes from the shows’ general theme of an old woman behaving badly. But it’s neither funny nor remotely plausible. Yes I’m sure my own Grandmother is a lot savvier than she sometimes appears. Yes I’m aware she thinks and feels the same things I do and yes she no doubt swears from time to time. But the sort of humour espoused in the show is not; as it seems to so proudly believe, “telling it like it is”. It’s cheap, in your face, hideously overdone cabaret comedy and it leaves you unable to really engage with it on any level.  Crucially, I just ain’t buying it. It’s a caricature and a bad one at that. Of course, maybe old people really are like that on the Emerald Isle, but I should bloody well hope not.