A bit of a turkey? Mrs Brown’s Boys special bombs – and ‘ruins’ Christmas

Mrs Brown’s Boys’ 2024 festive special saw its ratings plummet to the lowest ever – with viewers even claiming it ‘ruined’ their Christmas. The BBC sitcom, created by and starring Brendan O’Carroll as Agnes Brown, below, attracted a measly 2.2 million viewers on Christmas Day on the BBC – a huge drop from the 11.

5 million who tuned in to the show’s 2013 Christmas Day special. While the sitcom struggled in the ratings, elsewhere on BBC One, Gavin And Stacey: The Finale was the most watched show of the festive season with 12.5 million viewers, while 9.



5 million saw Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl. The latest episode of Mrs Brown’s Boys – which first aired in 2011 and has been described as ‘Marmite television’ – saw the Irish matriarch trying to convince her family she was not grumpy like Scrooge. But those at home described it as ‘spectacularly unfunny’.

On X , formerly Twitter, viewers fumed: ‘Usually love Mrs Brown’s Boys but this year’s special was so boring and really not funny’; ‘How awful was Mrs Brown’s Boys? My deepest sympathies if you had to sit through this’; ‘Christmas was going well until Mrs Brown’s Boys’; ‘Just been reminded Mrs Brown’s Boys is on tonight. Christmas ruined’. During rehearsals, the show became embroiled in a racism row after creator Brendan, 69, from Finglas in Dublin, alluded to the N-Word in front of shocked co-stars and production staff.

During a reading of the script while in character as Agnes Brown, he is said to have said ‘I don’t call a spade a spade, I call a spade a...

’ Brendan started to utter the N-word before he was stopped by a co-star, whose intervention was allegedly delivered in character as Agnes’s daughter. The comic apologised and said: ‘The one thing that incident did is give great awareness about racism, and great awareness about the BBC – they don’t take any messing.’.