I have to say a word in defence of All Round to Mrs Brown’s, the BBC One series that has just ended (but can be found on iPlayer). Leftie columnists say it’s the embodiment of Brexit – a 1970s-era, live-audience sitcom dredging up memories of a cosy past. And what’s wrong with that? Not all of us want to spend every evening watching Jon Snow grill a sociologist about food banks.
Mrs Brown is played by Brendan O’Carroll as a wisecracking Irish matriarch with a family of idiots, gays and other stereotypes. Why is she Irish? Because, I suspect, the British audience assumes the Irish still live in the 1950s and the themes of Church and family are happily nostalgic. Yet for every liberal decrying Mrs Brown as a conservative throwback, there’s a conservative decrying her for being foul-mouthed and sex-obsessed. They say that she doesn’t belong to the classic sitcom tradition because while Mrs Brown is obscene, the old shows were smutty yet innocent.
