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Lookit I'm not going to sigt here and try to a keep my own nose out of the trough when it comes to the debate around the quality of Mrs Brown's Boys. I don't watch it, I don't like it but I do understand there is an audience who absolutely adore it.
The Guardian's Euan Ferguson also understands that there is that audience but his view of them is a lot more scathing than mine would be.
Yesterday he ran roughshod over the show and its fans, claiming that its popularity should have been seen as one of the first warning signs that the British people had the capacity to vote in favour of Brexit.
The Observer's Mrs Brown's Boys review is a right rinsing pic.twitter.com/wGvjRYURbo
— Dean Van Nguyen (@deanvannguyen) January 1, 2017
It reads:
I decided not to lazily write off Mrs Brown’s Boys. It remains absurdly successful, despite critics having generally trashed Brendan O’Carroll’s creation as demeaning, cheap, grotesque, simplistic to the point of catalepsy, savagely lacking in wit. So I watched it, and was surprised. It’s all of these insults, yes, but the immersive experience is actually, shockingly, worse than expected. Sentimental to retching-point, homophobic, itch-lousy with single entendres, somehow managing to be both twee and vulgar, achingly unfunny, it made The Vicar of Dibley look like Father Ted.
I suspect those of us in our high ivory metropolitan-elite towers (translation: humans who paid even nugatory attention to at least one class in school) missed a trick in 2016: the popularity of this shameless excrescence (I can now write it off after due diligence), which was voted by Radio Times readers the best sitcom of the 21st century, should have given a huge clue to the Brexit vote.
Whether you empathise with Ferguson's view or not, I think we can all agree that 'excrescence' is a word we don't see used enough these days. You can read his full review column on The Guardian's website here.
