Brendan O'Carroll

Mrs Brown's Boys (BBC1) is like My Family meets Father Ted meets Dame Edna. Brendan O'Carroll, who also wrote it, plays Agnes Brown, who has a fruit and veg stall, swears a lot and interferes in the lives of her six children, one of whom is played by his real-life wife. It must be weird, pretending your husband is your mother.

Mrs Brown's Boys is not subtle or sophisticated. "Did Daddy always come late?" asks daughter/wife and the studio audience titter because it's not clear what kind of coming we're talking about. "That's none of your fecking business," says Mrs Brown, and they laugh some more because she said "fecking".

Grandad gets hit over the head with a frying pan, and a thermometer gets stuck up his arse. And Mrs Brown answers the Taser instead of the phone, just as you knew she was going to as soon as the Taser was plugged in to charge. I did find my self chuckling on a couple of occasions I'm afraid, against my better judgment.

Mrs Brown's Boys: I love the lines that aren't scripted

Welcome to the world of Agnes Brown. It's a world where family comes first, authority is to be challenged, and everything always works out in the end.

New, fourth-wall-smashing sitcom starring Dublin playwright Brendan O'Carroll as an interfering, gutter-mouthed mother- of-six - the TV version of a hilariously rude stage show. We're rarely more than 20 seconds from a "feck", or the more common Anglo-Saxon equivalent - although even the clean one-liners are often pretty wonderful ("When I was 18, I married his son, because of a condition I had called pregnancy").

Mrs Brown's Boys - BBC1, 10.35pm

Remember the 80s sitcom Bread, with Ma Boswell, Joey and grandad? Imagine the very best episode of that with Catherine Tate's Nan in the central role and you have the rough flavour of this brilliant comedy from Dublin comic Brendan O'Carroll.

Mrs Brown's Boys: BBC One's latest foul-mouthed sitcom

BBC One's new sitcom featuring Irish comedian Brendan O'Carroll may startle viewers with its frequent use of the f-word.

Potty-mouthed Dublin matriarch Mrs Brown - the creation of comedian Brendan O'Carroll - is a phenomenon in her native land, where she's the star of numerous comic novels and six stage shows. This sitcom is Mrs Brown's first appearance on British screens, where she is liable to startle the uninitiated with the rudimentary nature of her comedy: an old-fashioned blend of silly voices and slapstick, played out in front of a live studio audience who collapse into giggles at the mere mention of the word "willy". O'Carroll won't care what the critics say - the show's already topped the ratings in Ireland - but Mrs Brown's Boys does feel uncomfortably similar to the awful hokey sitcom that Ricky Gervais's character mugged his way through in Extras.

Brendan O'Carroll interview

After that first success on radio I started to feel invincible and to think I was bullet proof so I wrote a movie screenplay about a young Irish boxer. I thought I could walk on water, so I decided to make a film of it but it cost £2.2m, every penny of which I put in myself or borrowed. It was never released so it was a pretty rock bottom time for me.

BBC show uses F-word 34 times in 30 minutes

A new BBC1 sitcom will broadcast the "f-word" every 60 seconds. Mrs Brown's Boys, by Irish comedian Brendan O'Carroll, will go out after the watershed later this month but on the broadcaster's most popular channel.

Brendan O'Carroll interview

Brendan O'Carroll and his merry band of players have just finished recording Mrs Brown's Boys, a six part BBC sitcom, due to screen from the first week of the New Year.

Thin script, blue gags and pure ego

Brendan O'Carroll's pilot slipped beneath our radar when it was shown earlier this year. It certainly is exceptional - as in exceptionally awful.